Harlan Hits Hollywood

Harlan Ellison wrote some of my favorite television episodes, and hopefully some of yours.  There are the acknowledged classics for The Outer Limits and Star Trek, yes, and the combative stints on The Starlost and the eighties Twilight Zone.  But there are lesser-known gems, too.  There’s the quartet of gleefully horned-up Burke’s Law whodunits, all of which call out or lean into or send up the lust and misogyny that became Aaron Spelling’s golden ticket.  If you want a truly pure exercise in pop, sexy and slick, put on “Who Killed Alex Debbs?,” a riff on Playboy Club glamour that opens with the Hugh Hefner character’s corpse stuffed in a gilded cage.

There is the harrowing addiction story “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” which Ellison wrote for his friend Zalman King’s ambitious series The Young Lawyers (and which, because it overlapped with the truculent scribe’s short-lived TV column for The Los Angeles Free Press, became one of the best-documented cases of network neutering in an especially timorous era).  And there is Cimarron Strip’s “Knife in the Darkness,” a bold genre hybrid that followed Jack the Ripper to the American frontier.  “It was an examination of urban violence versus western violence, and urban violence wins every time,” the series’ producer, Christopher Knopf, told me.  Ellison, one of the twentieth century’s greatest complainers, thought “Knife in the Darkness” was badly directed.

Early in my career I interviewed Ellison about one of his early works, an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour based on his 1961 book Memos From Purgatory.  Starring a young James Caan as a thinly disguised, flatteringly buff version of Ellison, “Memo From Purgatory” was the science fiction writer’s first television sale, even though  it sat on the Hitchcock shelf for a couple of years (due to protracted rewrites or network squeamishness or both; Ellison’s memory was atypically vague, and the production records are inaccessible, although he was right for once about this one, which took on a West Side Story phoniness in the execution).  By the time it aired, in the no-one’s-watching Christmas week slot of 1964, Ellison had already done storied battle with the likes of Spelling, Irwin Allen, and the Control Voice (which mispronounced the word “Sumerian” in his narration for “Demon With a Glass Hand,” a flub that Ellison was still mad about decades later).

It could have gone the other way, given how unenthusiastically he suffered fools, but when I called Ellison from my dorm room that afternoon, I caught him in a generous, expansive mood.  Over the course of a ninety-minute conversation Harlan ended up telling me the tale of his ill-starred trek to Los Angeles to follow “Purgatory” into purgatory. That portion of the interview was such a lively digression that I set it aside with the hope of someday asking him to rewrite it as a foreword to one of two relevant books I was working on – a plan complicated somewhat by the fact that I still haven’t finished either manuscript.  Well, so much for that idea.  Harlan, who died on Thursday at the age of 84, has recounted parts of his cross-country odyssey in several essays and interviews, but I think this version may contain a few details not recorded elsewhere.

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How did your book, which was a work of (mostly) non-fiction, end up on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour?  It was an odd fit for that series and I didn’t know until you told me that it was actually your first script for television.

I guess it was Norman Lloyd or Joan Harrison, I never have been sure which, but it was one or the other, read the book.  It was either recommended to them or they stumbled across it.

I got a call from the Hitchcock office that they wanted to option Memos From Purgatory.  So, I was preparing to divorce my second wife at the time – it was kind of a strange situation – and she said, “As long as you’re going to divorce me, at least take me to California where it’s warm.”  Which seemed like an odd thing to say, but it made a bizarre sort of sense, so I said okay, and I accepted this offer to buy Memos, but only on the condition that I could write the script.  So they sent back word: “Yes, it’s okay, have you ever written any scripts?”  

And I, of course, lied in my teeth and said, “Oh, many.”

I had never even seen a script.  I had never done a teleplay in my when I accepted the gig.  They said, “We’re going to the one-hour format next season, and we’re going to want this script fairly quickly.”  So I said, okay, I would come out. I was sort of commuting between Chicago and New York at the time with my almost ex-wife and her fourteen year-old son from her previous marriage.  And I had no money at all. We got stuck in Cleveland [his hometown] and I had to wait until a check came through for this book I was doing.

We drove out from Chicago in the middle of winter, December [1961], Christmastime.  We were on the road, we got hit by this drunken cowboy on the access bridge leading down to Fort Worth.  We’d have been killed had we not had all our baggage and everything. My typewriter and everything was in the trunk and the backseat, and when this guy hit us doing about 60 miles an hour down this icy bridge, it stove in the back of the car and we got thrown into a whole pile of cars that were sort of smashed up on the bridge.  We got stuck in Fort Worth because we didn’t have the money to get out, and we were in a motel and there was a newspaper columnist who learned that we were there and he knew my name. He did this little bitty piece about “the author Harlan Ellison is stuck in a motel, his typewriter’s been smashed,” and the sheriff [actually police chief] of Fort Worth – I’ll never forget his name, his name was Cato Hightower – Cato Hightower sort of took me under his wing.  All of a sudden there was a garage that offered to fix the car for nothing, there was a stationery place, a typewriter shop that gave me a new Olympia. But we had no money – we had just enough money to pay for the motel.

We had enough money to limp out of Fort Worth, and it was still a long drive to Los Angeles.  We had only enough money for either gas or food, and so for the last I guess about six [or] seven hundred miles, all we had to eat, the three of us, was the last of a box of Stuckey’s pecan pralines.  To this day, to this day, the sight of pecan praline makes me want to throw up.

We limped into L.A., literally limped into L.A.  I had no idea where I was going. I had no contacts at all here.  We came in on the Hollywood Freeway, and I recognized it was Hollywood because I saw the Capitol [Records] Tower.  I turned off, and we went down Vine Street until I saw a TraveLodge and we went in there. We stayed there overnight until the next day, when I could call GAC [General Artists Corporation, a talent agency to which he had been referred] and bluff them into believing that I was this famous writer from New York, and that they’d better hurry up and send a car for me.  And they did! It was a complete and total bluff. It was like How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

They put us in a TraveLodge on Santa Monica Boulevard across from the Mormon Tabernacle.  I didn’t have any money at all. We had no way to get out of there, so I had to borrow two hundred bucks from Robert Bloch, an old friend.  And I borrowed from Bob a couple of teleplays, and I, sitting on toilet of this tiny little motel room of the Santa Monica Boulevard TraveLodge while my almost ex-wife and her son slept, I put a board across my lap and I sat there night after night and I wrote the very first teleplay I wrote, which was “Memos From Purgatory.”  It was just after New Years’, so it had to be sometime in January 1962.

Which is interesting, because “Memo From Purgatory” wasn’t broadcast until December 1964, nearly three years later.

There was some kind of an upheaval on the show or at Universal, I don’t know what it was, and they put the script aside for awhile.  Finally, when they got around to needing a rewrite, I already had an apartment. Billie, my almost-ex, a very nice woman, was living up in Brentwood and I was working my ass off to keep her up in this apartment in Brentwood, while I was living in this $135-a-month, two-room little house in Brentwood.  It was a treehouse in Beverly Glen. It’s not even there any more. The street isn’t even there any more. The street got washed away in one of the floods. And on the basis of the Hitchcock script, I was able to get more work and bluff my way through and learn as I went along, and I think along about my fourth or fifth script won the Writers Guild Award for best teleplay of the year in whatever category it was, [for] The Outer Limits’ “Demon With a Glass Hand.”

I was going to ask you if you remembered watching “Memos From Purgatory” when it was first broadcast, but perhaps you don’t, since it wasn’t actually the first one.

It’s a moderately funny story about what happened the night it aired.  I was living in Beverly Glen, in this little treehouse. The television set that I had was a real small TV, with rabbit ears, and the antenna was up the side of the mountain behind the house.  I mean this house, literally and actually, sat half on a rock ledge and the other half sat in the crotch of a gigantic banyan tree. It was raining that night, it was raining terribly. And the antenna, which was up the hill – rabbit ears down in the house and an actual antenna up on the hill; I mean, there was no cable – well, the antenna fell over.  

I had invited all these people to come and see the show, and we couldn’t get any reception.  So a friend of mine volunteered to go up, and he put on my raincoat, and he stood up there in the pounding rain, a really torrential downpour.  He stood up there holding the fuckin’ antenna up. And I was kind of, you know, upset that he was up there, not to mention that there were cougars or mountain cats – really, there were catamounts or cougars or whatever the fuck they are – up there running loose, because it’s all watershed land.  And I was terrified that he was going to get eaten, or washed away, or drowned, or fall off the mountain, or something. So about midway through I went up and I took his place. And I came back drenched, soaking wet, I looked like a drowned rat, and everybody was raving about this thing, and I had only seen about half of it.

Cosmopolitan ran a behind-the-scenes article on the inner workings of Burke’s Law in January 1964.  Is that Harlan, who’s mentioned in the text, at the typewriter?  Photo by C. Robert Lee

An Interview With David Levinson

Always arrogant, never wrong.  At some point around the middle of his career, they made a t-shirt for David Levinson with that line on it.  It was meant as a joke, of course.  But Levinson, the wunderkind producer who won an Emmy at the age of 31, always knew exactly what he wanted and wasn’t shy about being manipulative or pushy to get it.  You had to be unorthodox to ram Levinson’s kind of quality television onto the air in the seventies.  It was a period when frank sitcoms and one-off television movies earned most of the attention, and episodic drama was in serious decline.

Last year, I interviewed Levinson for an article and a subsequent oral history about The Senator (1970-71), the short-lived political drama that aired as part of the umbrella show The Bold Ones.  It was for The Senator that Levinson won the big trophy – one of five the show nabbed after it had been rewarded with a premature cancellation.  During the afterglow period, Levinson oversaw three other series – all made at Universal, all on the air for less than a year, all largely forgotten today, and all uncommonly good.  Earlier this year I sought David out for a follow-up interview that would shine some light on this underappreciated trio: Sarge (1971-1972), the final season of The Bold Ones (also informally known as The New Doctors, 1972-1973), and Sons and Daughters (1974).  As it turned out, we covered a great deal more.

A rundown for the uninitiated: Sarge starred Oscar winner George Kennedy as a cop who, following a personal tragedy, completes his seminary training and becomes a priest.  It was a straight drama that largely eschewed formula, even as it masqueraded as part of a gimmicky crimefighter cycle – fat private eye (Cannon), old private eye (Barnaby Jones), blind private eye (Longstreet) – that always teetered on the verge of self-parody.  Sarge’s genre trappings – like the hulking, karate-chopping sidekick played by Harold Sakata, briefly famous as Goldfinger’s Oddjob – somewhat constrained its more serious aspirations, but it’s a credible, unpredictable effort, and it remains one of Levinson’s personal favorites.

Levinson’s tenure on the final season of The New Doctors, on the other hand, remains one of my favorites among television’s hidden treasures – a major, last-gasp rethinking of a cerebral but impersonal medical drama.  Launched as part of the wheel show The Bold Ones, the series began under showrunner Cy Chermak as a smart but cold show with an emphasis on science and technology, rendered (like The Senator) in a realistic, almost pseudodocumentary style.  Levinson made it a show about the ethics of medicine, one that tackled controversial issues in every episode and arguably exceeded even The Senator in its aversion to pat answers.  But the Bold Ones experiment was a lame duck – one by one, the other entries had fallen away, leaving The New Doctors to fend for itself – and hardly anyone noticed.

Sons and Daughters was even more of a lost cause, eking out only nine episodes at a time when such rapid cancelations were still somewhat rare.  A period ensemble about small town teens and their parents, Sons and Daughters incorporated some autobiographical elements from Levinson’s own coming of age.  It had one of the most perfectly wrought pilots ever made, and the subsequent episodes unfolded vignette-style, each centered on a different character and picking up a plot thread carefully lain down in the pilot.  It’s difficult to find today (although bootlegs of all three shows have circulated, and The New Doctors came out on DVD this year), but the invaluable TV Obscurities website took a detailed look at Sons and Daughters that’s worth a read before proceeding.

After Sons and Daughters, Levinson made a conscious move toward escapism, for reasons he details below.  He passed through Charlie’s Angels and Mrs. Columbo, then spent the eighties and nineties working on genre shows like Hart to Hart, the revival of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and several Stephen J. Cannell productions (including 21 Jump Street and The Commish).  Levinson retired about a decade ago, but a protege, Craig Silverstein (creator of the current TURN: Washington’s Spies), lured him back into the writer’s room of the spy thriller Nikita.  Nikita went off the air in 2013 – some fifty years after Levinson sold an outline to Leave It to Beaver and got his name in the credits of a television show for the first time.

To pick up right where we left off last year: How closely did Sarge follow upon the end of The Senator?

Directly.  The studio had sold the series – on paper, arguably one of the silliest premises I had ever seen.  I hadn’t done anything like a detective show before.  This was very loosely – I mean, they made it similar to Father Brown, although it wasn’t.  The premise was that this was a guy who had studied for the seminary, dropped out, become a cop.  When his wife got killed, [he] went back to the seminary and became a priest.  But he kept getting involved in cases, because of his ex-cop [connections].  The studio called me and said we need somebody to produce it, because the guy who had created it wasn’t really qualified to run a show, in their opinion.  So I said yeah.

He isn’t credited as the creator of the show, only the original producer (Don Mankiewicz wrote the pilot), but are you referring to David Levy?

Yeah, David Levy.  Not the sharpest tool in the deck, but a very nice man.  He had a lot of credits.  As I recall, most of them were in the comedy area.  I don’t know how he had gotten hold of this particular thing.  But as I say, he was very nice, and I got rid of him as quickly as I could.  [Laughs.]  Because I didn’t want him getting in the way.  

It took us a little while to figure out the show, and the key to it – the story editor on the show was a man named Robert Van Scoyk, who was a terrific, terrific writer.  He was the one that, in a story meeting one day – because we were trying to figure out what was going on with it – finally said, “You know what?  He’s more interested in saving asses than he is in saving souls.”  With that, it just clicked in.  It really became him helping his parishioners when they got into trouble.

The [episode] that we did with Jack Albertson, “A Terminal Case of Vengeance,” that was written by Joel Oliansky and directed by John Badham, is the best show I’ve ever had my name on.  A completely outrageous ending.  It ends up with the Godfather on a beach in a ballet tutu.  It’s insane.  I just love it.

We started off with that crossover show, Ironside and Sarge.  I remember saying to the head of the studio, isn’t that a little bit like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein?  But NBC really wanted it, so we did it.  It turned out pretty well, I thought, all things considered.  I then managed to finagle the Albertson show to be the first one on the air [after the crossover], and the head of the studio protested.  He called me and he said, “You can’t put that on first.  It’s too weird.”  I said, “Well, there’s a problem, because nothing else is going to be ready.”  Which was kind of a fib.  But he didn’t know that.

Was this Sid Sheinberg?

Yeah.  So we went ahead, because that’s the one I wanted to get reviewed, and it got terrific reviews.

Do you think it might’ve turned off some of the potential audience, though?  

No.  I don’t remember what our competition was [The ABC Movie of the Week and Hawaii Five-O], but I know that it was really rugged, whatever it was.  We just got clobbered.  [George] Kennedy was great to work with.  It was like me hitting a daily double, with him and Hal Holbrook [on The Senator], because they’re two of the most gracious actors I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.  George was no-bullshit, very unpretentious, just came to work every day and worked his ass off.  I was sad when the show got canceled, because we had finally figured out how to do it, and we were having some fun with it.  But, as I say, the ratings were just dismal.  So another cancellation.  By this time I was getting used to them.

That was at the beginning of era of the gimmick detective show, with Ironside being essentially the progenitor of that little subgenre, and on the surface Sarge seems like it’s trying to be that.  Is that what the studio’s intent was with the show?

No, not at all.  I mean, I think they were delighted to have Kennedy as a presence in the show.  He had won his Academy Award by then, for Cool Hand Luke.  No, basically they didn’t know what the show was.  They just liked George Kennedy.

I never tried to mold any show I did after something that was already on the air.  My thesis always was that you just try to find out what the show wants to be and if you’re lucky enough to find it out before you get canceled, just keep doing it.  That was the case with Sarge.  We did find out early on how to make it work, and we made some, I thought, really, really good shows.  Very human.  It was a very humanitarian kind of show.  

The church called me and said, could you please put him in something besides a windbreaker?  They wanted to see that collar, boy.  We were doing everything we could to hide the collar.

To what extent did the Catholic church have input into the show?

Absolutely none.  I think their attitude was that if they closed their eyes maybe it would go away.  But we didn’t get any interference from them, and we shot, obviously, in several churches over the course of the season.

Do you remember more about the development of “A Terminal Case of Vengeance”?

[Laughs.]  Good question.  Joel [Oliansky] had up and moved to England, for no reason other than he always wanted to live in England.  Which was kind of Joel’s modus operandi.  So I called him, in England, and said, “Listen.  Is there a story that you always wanted to tell, that you were never able to sell anyone?  Because if you’ve got one, just tell it to me, and we’ll figure out how to make it into an episode.”  So he had this notion about a guy who had been humiliated years ago by a two-bit hood, who ultimately rose to become the West Coast godfather.  It has that marvelous opening with Sarge talking to Albertson, who’s all upbeat, and then Sarge finds out the doctor just told him he’s got six months to live.  From there it really turned into a mystery.  He’s worried that the guy may have committed suicide, goes to his place, finds all those pictures.  It was a pretty standard detective story, except for the twist that comes in, which is why he’s doing all this.  It was a very, very risky ending, because we did not want it to be funny.  We wanted it to be kind of tragic.  That this poor bastard has spent his entire life dreaming of the day of vengeance, and he’s going to get it, but it’s really the most hollow kind of victory.  

Badham just shot the hell out of it, and the actors were just superb.  Roy Poole was the godfather.  Mike Farrell played Albertson’s son, and he was terrific.  It was one of those things where everything that could go right did.  I can run the damn thing in my head, practically.  It’s, in my opinion, the best thing I ever did.

My own favorite might be Van Scoyk’s “A Bad Case of Monogamy,” which is almost a comedy, in which Sarge becomes a de facto marriage counselor for two pretty horrible people.

One of Bob’s great assets – he worked in the hour format, but he had a terrific sense of humor.  He would sprinkle every script with a lot of really funny stuff.  But this one, you’re right, it was very close to a balls-out comedy.  Because we didn’t want everything to be doom and gloom.  

We did a really good one [“Ring Out, Ring In”] with Marty Sheen.  That’s the one where he’s rehearsing the wedding rehearsal, and something about Martin Sheen, who’s the groom-to-be, strikes a memory chord [in Sarge], and he ends up having to arrest the groom for a murder that happened years ago.  I remember one of the best lines, because it nailed the whole series, where the bride-to-be comes to Kennedy, totally distraught, and screams at him, “You’re a priest.  Why can’t you just be a priest?”  It kind of summed up the conundrum that Kennedy would find himself in.

I thought the one with Vic Morrow (“A Push Over the Edge”), where he plays a homicide cop who becomes fixated on a case and just completely loses it, was very good.

Yes!  Yeah.  That one has Levinson’s name on it, as I recall.  As a writer.

I was going to ask about that more broadly, in terms of the extent to which you’re credited as a writer on the shows you produced.

You won’t see my name a lot.

Right.  I don’t really think of you as a “writing producer,” because you never really had a separate freelance writing career.

That is correct.  Not until I left Universal, and even then I technically wasn’t a “freelance writer.”  I was writing pilots and movies of the week.

So to what extent would you take to the typewriter yourself, versus assigning rewrites to others?

That particular show, Stan Whitmore had written a story that basically dealt with this serial killer, and he couldn’t write the script, for some reason.  He was off doing something else.  So I wrote it.  I didn’t write a lot, because the way Universal worked back in those days, you didn’t get paid for it.  It basically was applied against your guarantee.  So my attitude was, “Fuck you.  You’re not going to pay me, I ain’t gonna write.”  Which I always hated.  I hated writing till the day I stopped.  It’s just too goddamned hard!  But that particular one, I really knew the area, and it just made sense for me to do it.  And it was really good.  Vic was just terrific and Gerald [Hiken], who played the serial killer, he was just great.  It was really, really spooky.  There was a shot when he finds that his shoes have all been destroyed.  I remember John Badham, because we didn’t have anything fancy in those days, took a small camera called an Eyemo and hung it from the ceiling, from a catwalk, by a rope, and then he twisted the rope around and around and around.  When it came time to roll the shot, he let go with the rope, so the camera was spinning.  That’s that shot where he’s huddled up on the floor in a fetal position, and the room is just spinning around and around.  That was all John.

David Shire did the music for Sarge.  Was he someone you brought in?

Yeah.  Shire was one of the new kids on the block, and he and I fell in love right away.  I think he did all the music for the show.  As a matter of fact, I liked it so much that the following year when I took over The Bold Ones, I had David redo the theme for the show.  I got a phone call at home, like one minute after the show had gone off the air, from Sheinberg, who was furious.  He said, “What do you mean, replacing the music?  Everybody knows that music!  It’s identified with the show.  Get rid of that new theme.”  Which of course was infinitely better than what they’d had, but I was a good soldier and I got rid of the theme.

Sarge had an eclectic supporting cast.

Well, Oddjob was just great.  Harold Sakata.  Every once in a while I’d be down on the set talking to one of them, and the other one would come over and they’d just kind of surround me, Kennedy and Sakata together.  Big guys.  I’d say, “Am I being threatened?”  “No, David, no.  Just give us fewer lines to say.”

The martial arts aspect of Sarge strikes me as a bit gimmicky.

Yeah, well, that’s what he was known [for].  If you’ve got Oddjob, you’re going to use him.  It would be crazy to let a resource like that go untapped.

“John Michael O’Flaherty Presents the Eleven O’Clock War” was a very prescient indictment of irresponsible infotainment news personalities.

Yeah, Bill O’Reilly.  That was [written by] Bob Collins, wasn’t it?  Bobby was terrific, and went on to have a really, really good career.  He started off as a film editor, and he was a terrific film editor, but he wanted to write and ultimately direct, and ended up doing both.

Along with that crew of younger Universal directors – Badham, Richard Donner, and Jeannot Szwarc – you used one of my favorites on Sarge, Walter Doniger.

Walter was a close friend of several of my dearest friends.  One of them said to me, “You will want to kill him during the prep period.  And after he gets done shooting, you can’t wait to hire him again.”  And that’s exactly what happened.  Walter did every show as if it was both his first episode and going to be his last.  He gave you everything he had and, as result, during the prep period was a royal pain in the ass, because he wanted this, he wanted that, take a look at this, is this right, can we do this better?  He would just drive you fuckin’ nuts.  Then you would go and look at the dailies, and holy shit.  He was really, really good.  I loved working with him.  You know, if you go in knowing what it’s going to be, it’s less painful.  If the dentist says, “This is going to hurt like a sonofabitch,” as opposed to, “This may sting a little.”

I walked into his prep office one day, and there was maybe a three-inch or four-inch stack of checks that he had in front of him.  I said, “What are those?”  He said, “My Peyton Place residuals.”  By the time I worked with him, he didn’t need to work.  Peyton Place had made him a very wealthy guy.  He was not a kid any more, but he still had the same passion.

So how did you end up back on The Bold Ones?

When they canceled The Lawyers and went to a single [series], I don’t know whether it was the network’s idea or the studio’s idea, but they came and said, “We’d like you to do it.”  I’d never done a medical show, so I thought, “Cool, let’s do a medical show.”

What’s the backstory on The Bold Ones going to just one show?  And on some of the changes you instituted when you took the reins?

I guess it was Cy Chermak who had been producing the medical segments.  [Chermak oversaw the first two years; Herbert Hirschman replaced him for the lackluster third season.]  Cy was someone who I didn’t care for, both as a producer and as a human being.  Everything that he did, I had seen before, in one form or another, and I didn’t think much of it.  I thought the shows were really shitty.  I didn’t say that to anybody; didn’t need to.  They’d said to me, “Go do what you want to do.”  By that time, it was all centered around [David] Hartman, who they were planning on turning into a major star.  They dropped [John] Saxon.  It was just E. G. [Marshall] and Hartman.  Hartman: not one of nature’s noblemen.

But Hartman’s so likable on screen, though!

Oh, yeah.  Believe everything you see!  He had originally asked for me to do the show.  After about the fourth episode, he was calling NBC behind my back and asking that I be fired.  That’s David.

Why?

My shows were too edgy for him.

Isn’t that what he wanted when he asked for the producer of The Senator?

Evidently not.  [Laughs.]  Yeah, you’d kind of think.  After the third episode aired, I got a call from the West Coast chapter of the AMA, wondering when I was going to give up my attacks on the medical profession.  I responded, “When I run out of material, which ought to be in about five years.”

That’s one of the biggest stealth transitions of a long-running show that I’ve seen.  Almost to the extent of when Bruce Geller and Bernard Kowalski took over Rawhide and turned it into a stark revisionist Western, and quickly got fired for it.  On The New Doctors, all of sudden there was a hot-button topic every week, which isn’t how it had started out at all.  So I’m wondering, what are the factors that enable you to be able to alter the substance of a show so radically?

You know, I didn’t ask anybody.  The studio basically liked what I was doing.  The fact that it was edgy didn’t seem to bother anybody.  I mean, I had done – I think I may have told you the Virginian story?

No.

Oh, this is good.  By the way, I was a total asshole about this.  This is my second season on the show as a producer.  I’m like 27 years old.  I’d done like four episodes the season before, and I wanted desperately to do a show about black cowboys.  I talked to a writer by the name of Norman Jolley, and we’d come up with a really good story about a cowboy who had worked his whole life to save up the money for his son to go to college, and then he got ripped off.  In order to get his money back, he falls in with a bunch of rustlers to steal the cows from John McIntire’s ranch, and bad things happen.  

Nowhere in the script did it mention that the father and son were black.  Just the character names.

Everybody liked the script, and I go in to see the executive producer, and he says, “Who are you thinking of casting?”  

I said, “I want to cast James Edwards.”  

There’s this long pause, and the executive producer – who, by the way, was the nicest fellow you’d ever want to meet: Norman Macdonnell, who had produced Gunsmoke all those years – looked at me and said, “Isn’t he black?”

I said, “He was the last time I saw him.”  

Very gently, he explained to me that we had a primarily redneck audience and you just couldn’t cast a black man as the guest star in one of the shows.  I said to him, “Well, listen, you’re the boss, and if that’s the way you feel, that’s what we’ll do.  But I feel it only fair to tell you that I’m going back to my office and calling The New York Times and The L.A. Times to tell them about this conversation.”  

He came up from behind the desk, and he was a big guy.  His face was totally flushed and he looked at me and said, “You little cocksucker.”  

I said, “Yes, sir.”  

And we cast Jimmy Edwards.  The show went on the air.  There were no letters.  Nobody fucking noticed that there were two black actors playing the leads in this show.  But shortly thereafter I left The Virginian.

Yeah, I can’t say I’m surprised.

Sheinberg called me and he said, “David, Norman Macdonnell is the nicest man on the lot, and he wants to kill you.  What did you do?”  I said, “I don’t know.  I’ve just got a way with people, I guess.”  That was me then.  When I look back on it, it could have been handled much better.  But I was 27 years old and I thought I was invincible.

It is belately occurring to me that you had already worked with David Hartman on The Virginian.

Yeah.  He and I had a conversation early on, where I said to him, “You’re not fooling me with this nice guy act.”  

“What do you mean?”  

I said, “David, you’re an asshole.  I know you’re an asshole.”  

He said, “Well, it takes one to know one.”  

I said, “That’s how I know!”

He felt that I was destroying The Bold Ones by doing these very hard-edged types of stories.  And I let him know that I knew about it.  Because, what’s the fun of it if you can’t let them know that you know they’re duplicitous?  Also, he was very upset because we were going in the crapper ratings-wise.  Which was not a surprise to anybody.  I forget what the competition was [The ABC Movie of the Week and the second half of Hawaii Five-O on CBS, again], but it was horrific.  This was in the days when NBC did not have a lot of real strong shows.  So I’m a good scapegoat for the ratings being shitty.  It’s always been the showrunner who takes it in the shorts.  That’s okay; I mean, that comes with the territory.  I was making the show the best I knew how.  And, as I say, he just didn’t like the fact that it was going down in flames.  Well, who would?  And we finished out the seventeen shows and went off into the sunset.

I’m wondering if that has something to do with the way that Robert Walden emerges, to a certain extent, as the new star of the show during that last season.

Well, no, that wasn’t intentional, and I don’t know that I agree with that assessment.

Well, he’s the protagonist of some episodes, including the one I remember the most clearly – the lesbian love triangle.

Yes.  Well, the network had made two requests.  They wanted me to do a show on Masters and Johnson and the sex therapy clinic, and they wanted me to do a show about lesbianism.  Fine with me.  In terms of satisfying that, well, yeah, you figure out how to tell a story about lesbians and make it personal and part of our cast, particularly because we had no women regulars in the cast.  We sat around and did a lot of “what if”s, and one of the “what if”s was “what if you fall in love with a woman who’s gay?”  I think we called it “A Very Strange Triangle,” and I know that we were working toward that confrontation between Bobby Walden and Donna Mills’ partner.  That was the big scene.  But it was obvious that that was the only way to do it, make Bobby be the protagonist in it.  

By the way, he was terrific.  I forget where we had seen him; some movie where he had really just been very impressive.  He’s got wonderful energy, and we were thrilled to have him on the show.  But there was never any conscious effort to make him the lead in the show.  That was Hartman.  That was never in question.

What was your take on E. G. Marshall?

The best.  Total pro.  Showed up, did his work.  No fuss, no muss, no bother.  He was just an angel.  And a very funny guy, by the way.  We did a show with Milton Berle.  I remember going down to the set, and E. G. and Milton were breaking each other up.  I remember I jumped in with some smartass remark, and Milton just turned and looked at me and said, “You really want to play with us, kid?”

I said, “No sir.  No sir.”  

I’d like to talk about some of the other specific episodes, and the topics you covered in them.  There are very few duds in there.  The New Doctors has just come out on DVD, and I hope people find this final season, even if they don’t care for the earlier ones.

We were very leading edge on that show.  We did a show on embryo transplants, before anybody had even thought about it.  There was research being done on it underground.  When I talked to one of the guys, I said, “Can I come over and see your lab?”  He said, “No.  Because if anybody ever finds out about the lab, they’ll come and burn us out.”  They hadn’t taken an embryo to full term yet; they were just going a month at a time.  That’s how far ahead of the curve we were on that one.

The show we did on cancer patients, that was based on the work of a doctor in Houston, whom I spent hours on the phone with, that [Richard] Donner directed, was just superb.  It was a female patient who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.  I remember the doctor saying to me, “The biggest problem I have is that the minute the patient hears they have cancer, they start to die right there.  What I’ve got to do is get them past the fear, so I can give them a longer, better quality of life for the time they have left.”  That stuck with me so much.

Jeff [Myrow, the writer] had been a documentarian, had done a lot of stuff for Wolper, and wanted to break into the one-hour drama business.  I gave him the shot at doing this thing, and he wrote a good script, and Donner directed it terrifically.  We took her through her first night in the hospital in about sixty seconds, that whole terrifying experience about checking in and knowing that you’ve been diagnosed as terminal, and what it’s like.  It was all Dick.  He knew how to do it and make it work.  So much of it was about getting over the fear.  Because in those days, nobody ever said cancer.  It was “the big C” or “the bad disease” or “a long illness,” but nobody ever just came out and said, “Yeah, I got cancer.”

It was one of those now innocuous words that you couldn’t say on TV, like “pregnant.”

Right.  Shit, I remember twenty years ago when I was diagnosed with cancer for the first time, my GP said to me, “You’re going to be taking time off from work.  Don’t tell anybody why you’re leaving.”  

I said, “What are you talking about?”  

He says, “Well, people associate cancer very negatively.  It might hurt you professionally.” 

I said, “That’s like telling me I should wear a toupee.  Ain’t gonna happen.”  

I went in to Steve Cannell and said, “Listen, I’ve got prostate cancer.  I’m going into the hospital.”  

He said, “Okay.  Let me know how everything turns out.”  It’s like, I’m not going to keep it a secret.

Robert Collins’s script about impotence is one of my favorites.  When I first watched it years ago, I didn’t realize that – like the current series Masters of Sex – the sex therapists in the last act are based on Masters and Johnson, who offered practical counseling to couples with sexual problems.

I went back to St. Louis to spend time with Bill and Ginny.  Somebody said, “Why are you going back there by yourself?”  I said, “They’re going to show me how to masturbate.”  

It was tough, because they had had a lot of adverse publicity, due to the fact that they had both been married when they started their research, but not to each other.  They broke up their marriages, they got married, and then they got hit with a suit from one of the surrogate husbands, who she hadn’t bothered to tell that she was doing this.  He sued for divorce and named Masters and Johnson as the correspondents.  So they were a little gunshy.  I was able to convince them that we weren’t going to be exploiting it in any way, or making any judgment about it.  We were just going to try to show what it was like.  The show turned out okay.  It wasn’t one of my favorites.

What was your take on Masters and Johnson?

It was basically good cop, bad cop.  He was very stern and a little bit intimidating, and Virginia was a wonderful Jewish mother: “You don’t like the sex therapy?  I’ll make you chicken soup.”  Just really a nice lady.  

I did get one really funny call from a producer on the lot, who said, “I understand you’re going back there.  Would you like to talk to a former patient?”  “Ooookay.”  I go up to his office and he starts telling me about all the problems he and his wife were having sexually.  I’m looking around, saying, “Who do I fuck to get out of here?”  Because it’s not stuff you want to hear firsthand.

I’m even surprised that you were able to take the time to fly to Missouri to prep an episode of a weekly TV show.

Well, the network had requested it, which made it a lot easier than if I’d walked in and said, “Oh, I want to do this.”  But they gave us travel in those days.  

The teenage alcoholic show, the movie I did [Sarah T. – Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic], also came about because of a network guy – the president of NBC at the time, who discovered that one of his relatives was an alcoholic.  He called the studio and said, “This is a terrible problem,” can they do a show about it?  Because I was the resident literari, which means I read a lot of books, they called me and said, “What book could we adapt?”  

I said, “Well, there’s a couple, but they’re all going to come out looking like a remake of The Lost Weekend.  If you want to do something interesting” – again, this was a blurb at the bottom of a newspaper column – “I read somewhere that kids are turning away from pot and turning to alcohol from their parents’ closets, because it’s so much easier to get ahold of.  You could do a show on teenage alcoholism.”  

The next thing I know I’ve got a commitment from NBC to do a two-hour movie on teenage alcoholism.  When the network would request something, the studio generally acceded to it.

Otherwise, were they mostly hands-off on The New Doctors?

Well, no.  The Broadcast Standards people were really terrible.  

Aha.  Tell me about some of those clashes.

The one that sticks in my mind the most was on the unnecessary surgery show [“Is This Operation Really Necessary?”], where they wanted me to change “her uterus” to “the uterus.”  I said, “Why would you want that?”

They said, “Well, it’s less personal.”  

I said, “Wait a second.  A woman’s uterus is the most personal thing she’s got.  Why would you want to make it impersonal?”  

“Well, we just feel it would be less…”  Blah, blah, blah.  I think, if I recall, I won that battle.

The one that we didn’t win, and this was again Bobby Collins at his best: On the Masters and Johnson show they called us and said, “You cannot use the word erection.”  

I said, “Wait a second.  You guys, NBC, asked me to do a show about a sex therapy clinic.  That’s one of the symptoms.  Why would you not let me….”  

“Well, you can’t use it.”  

I called Bob and said, “What are we going to do?”  

He said, “It’s okay.  I’ve got a solution.”  

He substituted the word reaction: “When’s the last time you had a reaction?”  It’s so close, they might as well have let us say “erection.”  That’s what a good writer can do for you.  But it was the stupidest kind of censorship, because I was not in the business of trying to do anything licentious.

Did anyone take the bait on that show?  I mean, did The New Doctors trigger any kind of public controversy?

No.  First of all, we didn’t have enough viewers.  [Laughs.]  But, no.  Again, like with the black cowboys, everybody assumed that this stuff was really controversial, and it wasn’t.  It was controversial in their minds but not in anybody else’s.

Universal had a weird schism during that period when they dominated television output by such a wide margin.  They produced a lot of really banal, commercial shows, and I think that’s what people tend to remember more today, but they also did some expensive-looking, intellectual shows, like the ones you worked on.

I remember I was having a meeting with Sid one night and he said, “I’ve got to look at a couple of Adam-12s.  Come on and watch them with me.”  So we go down and I sit through two of them, and I’m like, “Ugggghhhh.”  He said, “David.  Adam-12 pays for your shows.  These shows are the ones that allow us to do the kind of stuff you do.  So don’t be so dismissive.”  He was absolutely right.  Sid understood that, that you can’t just do the shows you like.  You have to do the shows that are going to bring in some business.

Sons and Daughters may be my favorite of the shows we’re discussing.

That’s surprising.  I love it, but it ain’t my favorite.

Well, first of all, who was M. Charles Cohen, who’s credited as the creator of the series?

M. Charles Cohen was a Canadian writer.  I honestly don’t remember why the hell I chose him to do this.  He was an older guy.  Way older than me, and I grew up in the fifties.  I mean, he was a very good writer, but it was not good casting.  I ended up rewriting most of [the pilot], because he didn’t know how to write the kids.  Or the adults, very well.

So the show was more your conception than his?

Well, I don’t know.  We worked together.  I drew a lot on my own growing up.  As a matter of fact, one of my dearest friends, who watched the pilot, said it moved him so much he went back into therapy.  It brought up so many memories.  He and I had grown up together.  But I didn’t grow up in a small town.

Where did you grow up?

Chicago.  

This all started with Sheinberg saying to me, “We’d love to do some version of Red Sky at Morning as a series.”  That was a movie with Richard Thomas.  It was a family drama, a period piece.  That’s where it started.  We got a script that NBC liked a lot, and then chose not to do it.  I can’t remember why.  They ended up showing it to CBS, which I guess was kind of good news.  At the time it seemed like good news.  We made a pilot, and it sold.  Freddy Silverman loved it.  The biggest problem with the show was that it got slotted at 7:30, in what was then the family hour, so we couldn’t deal with sexuality at all.  You can’t do a show about teenagers without delving into sexuality.  It’s just ridiculous.  I mean, I grew up in the fifties, and nobody got laid.  But we thought about it a lot, and we pursued it a lot, and a lot of fun came out of it – a lot of funny experiences.  To not be able to really touch on it at all made it almost impossible to have any fun with the show.

Although the question of whether Gary Frank and Glynnis O’Connor are going to have sex is very present, isn’t it?

Yeah, but we’re dancing around it pretty good.  It was hard.  We also had problems, not the least of which was Little House on the Prairie [which debuted opposite Sons and Daughters on NBC].  I remember my kids coming to me very abashedly and saying, “Dad, we don’t want to hurt your feelings, but we’re not going to watch your show.  We’re going to watch Little House on the Prairie.”  I should have known at the time that that was the tolling of the bell.  Doom!

To what extent did American Graffiti influence Sons and Daughters?

Obviously, a lot.  The whole night thing, that night sequence [in the pilot] that went on forever, was right out of Graffiti.  Where they’re driving around town all the time in the cars.  Because we lived in our cars.  I had loved the movie, so it was very much in my mind when we were developing it.  

That sequence, by the way, got me in all kinds of trouble, because it was meant to be shot over two nights.  We got a forecast that bad weather was moving in.  We could shoot one night, but we wouldn’t be able to shoot [the second night] for another two weeks.  And we couldn’t come back to Stockton, where we were shooting it, so I made the decision that we would just shoot all night.  Which, in those days, cost a fortune.  I got a phone call from my pal: “What the hell happened?!”  

“Well, we got this bad weather report.  I couldn’t take a chance on not being able to come back, so we just went ahead and shot.”  

He said, “Well, did the bad weather come?”  

I said, “No.”  And he hung up on me.

This was Sid Sheinberg again.  

This was Sid.

Can you elaborate on what elements in the show are drawn from your life?  Are you a character in it?

Oddly enough, not really.  None of the characters is specifically drawn [from] my childhood memories.  They’re amalgamations, to a large degree.  The death of a parent, yes, I experienced that.  As did my best friend.

Dana Elcar is so good as the gentle dad, that it’s heartbreaking when he dies in the pilot.

Yeah.  We wanted the two kids each being faced with crises.  So the death of the father and the divorce of Glynnis’s parents served to do that, and served to kind of bring them together.  At least that was the intent.

Was there much discussion of how much Sons and Daughters would be serialized, versus telling self-contained stories each week?

Oh, yeah.  Freddy came out of daytime, and he insisted that we lay out the entire season.  All 24 episodes.  It was maybe one of the most difficult chores I had ever attended to.  We had to have overriding arcs that would last for six or seven or eight episodes.  He wanted one arc that would last over all 24.  At the same time, he wanted episodes to have beginnings, middles, and ends.  It was a very tall order.  The guy that I was working with on the show, Dick DeRoy, who was also one of my compatriots on Hart to Hart, had been on Peyton Place.

And so had Michael Gleason.

As had Michael Gleason, yeah.  I had hired Joseph Calvelli, who was a terrific writer.  Halfway through writing the first episode after the pilot, he had a heart attack.  He was not going to be able to do the show.  So Michael very graciously agreed to step in and help out.  He was terrific.  He went on to create this little show called Remington Steele.

Freddy was absolutely dogged in terms of getting this whole thing laid out.  I said, “Well, what if you cancel us?  All this work!”  

He said, “Don’t worry about that, you’re going to be fine.”  

Nine episodes later, bam!  There was no warning.  Nobody said this was coming.  Freddy said to us, “Come over to CBS.”  We walked in and he had that big white board with the schedule on it, and right in our timeslot was an empty space.  [Laughs.]  It was like staring into an open grave.

And for the benefit of the three remaining Sons and Daughters fans in the universe, do you recall how any of those story arcs would have ended?

Oh, no, I don’t have any idea.

No big finale planned?

I know that it did finish off some stories, and kind of left a cliffhanger.  Again, nobody was doing that in prime time.  I guess Peyton Place had broken that ground.  After I left Universal, before I went over to Charlie’s Angels, I did a pilot for Freddy, based on an English series, about steel workers in Gary, Indiana, that was going to be a prime time soap.

What was it called?

I called it Dream Street.  It never got made.  It broke my little heart, because when they read the script, everybody loved it, and I got a call to go over and talk with the head of ABC production to start laying out a budget and the whole thing.  This pilot, if it got on the air, was going to be on three nights a week, which means I was going to be very, very rich.  

Then I got a call about a week later from the head of development, who was a good buddy, and he said, “Listen, there’s this one glitch.  We forgot about this thing we’ve got, this miniseries called Rich Man, Poor Man.  Freddy feels that if that works out he’ll put that on as a soap.  But if it doesn’t, we’re going to go with yours!”

Do you remember casting Sons and Daughters, particularly the young people who hadn’t done much before that?  And the adult actors, like John Ragin and Jan Shutan.

Jan was not meant to be a continuing character.  That character of Ruth was just going to be in for the pilot.

Oh, that’s right, she moves out of town in disgrace at the end of the pilot.

Exactly.  What happened was that when I brought DeRoy in, he looked at me and said, “You’re dropping her?  Are you crazy?  She’s one of the best characters you’ve got going.”  So we kept her.

Then Dabney Coleman (who played the character based on Bill Johnson in The Bold Ones) comes in as the guy she left her husband for, and he’s great.  You’re ready to hate him, but he’s so normal and decent.

Yeah, well, as I said to Jan once, there was a reason why Dabney was always cast as an asshole.  

But the casting of the show, it was not easy.  Freddy was very demanding.  He had specific do’s and don’t’s.  I remember one phone call with Ethel Winant, who was the head of casting [for CBS] at the time, and we were getting down to it pretty close.  She was borderline hysterical: “What are we going to do?  Freddy won’t make up his mind, and I don’t know what to do!”  

I said, “Listen.  What’s the worst that can happen?”  

She said, “We won’t make the pilot!”  

I said, “That’s right.  Is that going to end the world?  Are they going to take your children out into the street and shoot them?  Are they going to throw you off a mountain.  No.  They won’t make the fucking pilot.  Big deal.”  

She said, “You know, I never thought of it that way.”  

And of course Freddy approved Glynnis.  It was the only time that – we had better actors, but we didn’t have anybody that was as appealing as her.  I mean, you look into those eyes, you could just fall into them.  It was impossible not to be in love with Glynnis.

I found myself with more of a crush on Debralee Scott, who played the girl with the bad reputation.

Debralee was one of the people that Freddy was considering [to play the lead], and I was resisting that because I didn’t think she was right.  I wanted somebody who was supremely vulnerable, and Debra, god bless her, was a tough broad.  Thank goodness it finally fell our way.

And of course your current marriage came out of Sons and Daughters.

Yeah.  I had separated from my wife very early on while we were developing the series.  This was some time in late July or August.  We were shooting, and I walked in one day and Jan was sitting on the set looking very disconsolate, and I said, “What’s wrong?”  

She said, “My husband and I have separated.”  

I said, “That’s too bad.  Would you like to go out?”  I had found her very attractive, but she was married.  Well, when she wasn’t married any more, she was even more attractive.  And we’ve been together since 1974.

I think we’ve disagreed a bit on the relative merits of the Universal shows you produced.  How would you rank them?

Without question, the best of them was The Senator.  And I’m very, very fond of Sarge.  I think that we made so much better a show out of it than anybody could have anticipated.  And I’m proud of a lot of episodes I did on The Bold Ones.

To me that’s really a bookend with The Senator.  In a way, it’s just as political.

Yeah.  But I had grown up in a medical family.  I was ten years old before I found out that not every man in the world was a Jewish doctor.  Hanging around this many doctors, I had kind of been privy to a lot of stuff that you don’t see on medical series.  As a matter of fact, one of the things that I couldn’t get through was the shot of a bunch of doctors standing in front of an x-ray, shaking their heads and saying, “Beats the shit out of us.”  The network said, “You can’t do that!”  I said, “But I’ve seen that.”

The one with Susan Clark [“An Inalienable Right to Die”], who was in the boating accident, was about the patient’s right to die.  That was kind of a telling experience, because in large degree it changed the course of my career.  First time that had ever been done on television, because you couldn’t deal with it.  I had seen [the idea] somewhere, because I was a voracious newspaper reader then, which is where I was getting most of my stories.  They were not ripped from the headlines, they were ripped from the bottom of the column, the filler stuff that they put in.  And I read somewhere that in Florida, somebody had brought an injunction against a hospital keeping them on life support, and it had gone to trial and the guy had won the injunction.  I used that as evidence that there was precedent for this kind of story, and I was able to get the network to approve it.

I ran into a friend of mine after the show some months after the show had aired, and she said to me, “You know, I saw that show, and it put me in a depression that lasted for weeks.”  

I thought to myself, “Man, that is not the business you should be in.  That’s not what you’re doing.”  

I mean, I felt very strongly about the patient’s right to die with dignity.  But I found that using my TV shows for that kind of forum was not the best way to go.  It didn’t stop me from doing [A Case of Rape], which had a really downbeat ending.  But I remember when we did the teenage alcoholic show, the writers wanted her to die at the end and I said, “No fuckin’ way.  She’s not going to go through all this shit to end up on a slab.  She’s going to go to an AA meeting and stand up and say, ‘My name is Sarah T. and I’m an alcoholic,’ and everybody’s going to go home happy.”

That was Sarah T.: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic?

Yeah, with Linda Blair.  Those two movies got humongous ratings.  With the teenage alcoholic show, [Richard] Donner had a great idea, which was to get those stations to post a local call-in number – all the NBC affiliates – and the stations were flooded with calls for days after the show was on the air, from kids looking to get into a program.  That one, I went around saying, “Jesus, if it worked for one kid, you just saved a life.”

The other important made-for-TV movie you produced during that period was A Case of Rape.

This was a project that was brought to the studio by a guy who had not produced before, so they asked me if I wanted to oversee it.  What Lou [Rudolph] had developed had the protagonist as a twenty-one year old single woman, and I immediately said, “That won’t work.  I can’t sustain two hours simply on whether or not she’s going to get revenge.  It just won’t hold.  I want to make her in her thirties and married.”  Well, the network didn’t like that at all.  I believe it was because they had their own dark fantasies, sitting and looking at dailies.  They wouldn’t budge, so I quit the project.

What do you mean by “dark fantasies”?

What do you think?

Spell it out for me.

Well, they’re going to sit and mentally masturbate at the idea of a young girl being raped.

Really?  It was that crass?

That’s my guess.  But in any event, they wouldn’t budge and I wouldn’t budge, so I quit.  Because I said I’m not going to be responsible for a two-hour I-told-you-so.  The next day I got a call from a network executive who growled into the phone, “Okay, you win.”  And we had a married thirty-year-old woman [as the protagonist].  

The addendum to this particular story is that after the show had been made, I found myself at a party with this same NBC executive, who looked at me and said, “Aren’t you glad we talked you into making her married instead of young and single?”  At first I thought he was putting me on, but he wasn’t.  I love show business.

How did Elizabeth Montgomery end up attached to the project?

She had done a couple of movies of the week for ABC, which always boiled down to a young woman, alone, being threatened.  This was several strides up for her.  The studio was desperately looking to bring her in to do a series with her, so they offered her this.  She was not who I wanted, but that didn’t matter.

Was there someone specific that you wanted to cast?

Yeah, I wanted Tuesday Weld.  I had seen her in Play It as It Lays, which was an adaptation of a Joan Didion novel, and she was just superb.  But didn’t obviously have the TV name that Elizabeth Montgomery did.  So I lost that one.  

We went ahead, and Liz came in.  She’d been running her show for all these years, and expected to be able to do the same thing.  The first clash we got into was over the casting of the rapist.  We both agreed that we didn’t want him to look like a rapist.  [Instead it should be] a nice, clean-cut kid.  There was a young man under contract, a nice-looking guy, Cliff Potts, with a charming smile and a charming manner.  She went a little ballistic and said he looked like he should have a bolt in the side of his neck, because he looked like a monster.  I said, “Well, he’s who you’ve got.”  She didn’t like that at all.  

She had all kinds of ideas and one day I finally said to her, “You know what, Liz?  Why don’t you produce the picture?  You can have my office.  I’ll give you my desk, my phone, my typewriter, and you can produce the goddamn thing, because I’ve got other things to do.”  At which point she backed off.  

Then we started making the movie, and [director] Boris Sagal was just wonderful, as he always was.  We finished the courtroom [scenes] first.  The script had an addendum, with her striding out of the courthouse undaunted, proud, and her head up high.  Now, when the writer asked me what I wanted the intent of the picture to be, I had originally said I want women either throwing things at their television set or cutting their husbands off sexually for the next month.  I wanted to really raise anger, because there was a law on the books at the time that in rape trials in California you were to disregard the testimony of the victim because it couldn’t be corroborated.  It was obscene.  So I really wanted to do a little yellow journalism, if you will.

Anyway, we were filming stuff in the courtroom and there was a shot that Boris made, and I looked at it and I thought, “Boy, that’s a good ending to the movie.”  As it turns out, we got ahead of schedule, and the only thing that was left was this two-eighths of a page of her striding out of the courthouse.  I knew I was never going to use it, and I saw a chance to save fifty grand.  So I announced that we were wrapped.  

She went insane.  It was the only reason she did the picture, to prove she didn’t get knocked out by [the rape] – all good feminist arguments.  But not the picture that I had set out to do.  

In any event, I got called up to the studio president’s office.  This was not Mr. Sheinberg.  This was Frank Price, who took the place of Mr. Sheinberg when Mr. Sheinberg moved up to become Lew Wasserman.  I was not a fan of Mr. Price.  Wasn’t, and still am not.  He had this habit of drumming his fingers on his desk.  Very Nixonian.  He said to me, “I understand you don’t want to shoot that last scene.”  

I said, “That’s right.  I don’t need it.”  

He said, “Well, you know, the studio’s looking to develop a relationship with Elizabeth, and I think that it might be a very good idea for us to go and shoot the scene.”  

I said, “Frank, it’s your fifty grand.  It ain’t coming out of my pocket.  But I’m telling you we don’t need it.”

“Well, we’re going to go ahead and shoot it anyway, David.”  

So they all traipsed downtown to the courthouse, and Boris spends the entire day shooting this two-eighths of a page.  I’m playing fair, so we put the picture together and that’s the ending we had on it.  Now I run it for a couple of the studio executives, and when the lights come on they say, “Why doesn’t it have the punch that we thought it should have?”  

I said, “Interesting that you should ask that question.  Let me show you an alternative reel I prepared.”  And that had the ending that I had seen in dailies those weeks before.  I ran the last reel again and the lights came on, and they were like, “Holy shit.”  

I said, “Well, you can go talk to Frank about it.  I’ve had my discussion with him.”  

So once again David gets called up to Frank Price’s office.  “I understand from my executives that the picture seems to work better without the ending coming out of the courthouse.”  

I said, “Yeah, that’s right, it does.”  

He said, “You wasted fifty thousand dollars?”  

I said, “No, Frank, you wasted fifty thousand dollars.”  

He said, “Well, maybe I wasn’t listening close enough.”  

I said, “I suggest next time when I talk, you listen.”  And got up and walked out of the office.

The show got a fifty share, because, I mean, who’s not going to tune in to watch the Bewitched lady get raped?  The best thing that came out of it for me was the call we got from Sacramento.  They had rape legislation pending that was going to knock out that rule about ignoring the victim, and they said, “Could you send a print of the picture up here?  Because we want to show it to the guys who are on the fence.”  Subsequently the legislation passed.

You told me that Robert Collins rewrote A Case of Rape without credit.

The Guild denied him credit.  It was shameful.  He brought life to the characters.  The guy who wrote the original script, Bob Thompson, it was written by the numbers.  It was all flat, predictable; you didn’t care about anybody.  You were only meant to care about her because she’d been attacked.  There was nothing in her character that made you want to like her, or her husband.  They were all ciphers, kind of, and Bob [Collins] made them human beings.  All the intimate moments are his.

I guess your thoughts about that reaction to “An Inalienable Right to Die” are partly an answer to this, but: Tell me how the Emmy-winning producer of The Senator ends up on Charlie’s Angels only half a decade later.

I had lost a job, not because of my big mouth, but because of my propensity for relevant issues.  My name had been brought up at NBC to do some show, and the head of NBC at the time said, “No, he’s too relevant.”  This was passed back to me.

Do you remember what the show was?

No.  But shortly thereafter, I got this call from my agent, saying, “You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you, but Aaron Spelling just called and they want you to come in and produced Charlie’s Angels.”  

I said, “What?!”  What went through my mind was, “That cocksucker at NBC, I’ll show him how irrelevant I can be!”  And I went over and did the show.  

Now, to be honest, I did it the best I knew how to do it, because I don’t know any other way.  I remember having an interview with Time magazine, because the girls were going to be the cover, and I didn’t want to do it.  I said, “But Aaron, why aren’t they interviewing you?”  

He said, “They don’t want to talk to us, they want to talk to somebody who’s actually on the lot every day.  If you don’t do it, it’s going to reflect badly on the show.”  

I said, “Okay, fine, I’ll do it.”  

So the Time guy comes in, and he’s looking for dirt.  There were all kinds of rumors floating around about how difficult they were.  He said to me, “Can you believe that this is going to be a cover story on Time magazine?  This show?”  

I said, “Hey, man, it’s your magazine.”  

He said, “Well, tell me about the girls.  How are they?”  

I said, “They are wonderful.  It is a joy to get up every morning and drive into work knowing that I’m going to get to deal with these three kind, bright, gorgeous women.”  I said, “I’m maybe the luckiest guy in town.”  

He finally looked at me and said, “You’re not going to tell me a goddamned thing, are you?”  

I said, “You got that right, baby.”  And if you were to dig up the Time article, I’m nowhere mentioned in the story.

Were Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts on the show at that time?

No.  They just did the pilot and then they left, although I did get a very nice call from the two of them.  What I came up with that they hadn’t really realized [was] I said to Leonard [Goldberg], “If the idea for the show doesn’t make you grin, it’s not a good area.”  To put them in the army, to put them in the Playboy world, all that stuff was kind of fun.  So we did one that was a takeoff on The Maltese Falcon, and ended up with one of the most famous sequences of Charlie’s Angels, which is Farrah [Fawcett] on a skateboard being pursued by a heavy in an ice cream truck through Griffith Park.  Anyway, I got a call from the two guys and they said, “Thank god somebody finally got what we intended when we came up with the show.”  They intended it to be kind of a comedy.  Unfortunately, Aaron and Len were not in the comedy business.  They couldn’t see it.  But I thought, “Shit, if it isn’t funny, don’t do it.”

Is that why you left the show so quickly?

No.  I had two pilots going, a pilot at ABC and a pilot at NBC, and when they called me and said how many shows do you want to do, I said, “Well, four sounds about right.  By then you’ll be sick of me, I’ll be sick of you, it’ll be time to move on.  You’ll see.”  They didn’t believe me.  They asked me to stay for the rest of the season, and my response was, “I’m losing valuable I.Q. points every day I stay here.”  Aaron, who was really pissed that I didn’t stay on, told the girls that I had violated my contract.  He was a bit of a shit, not that that’s any surprise to anybody who worked in the business.  I loved working with the girls, but it was not my metier, not what I do.

So that was actually true, what you told the Time reporter!

Oh, yeah.  No, they were good.  Kate was crazy.  Kate was crazier than a loon, but the other two could not have been more joyous to work with.  Farrah was incredibly funny.  Jackie [Jaclyn Smith] was sweet beyond belief.  Just really nice women.

I wouldn’t have guessed that Kate Jackson was the difficult one.

She was far and away the best actor, there’s no question about that, and very bright.  Most of her anger, I think, dealt with the fact that Aaron and Len had said, “We’re going to develop a series for you.”  And then they cast Farrah.  I understand where her anger came from – “I’m pissed off because you cast someone who’s really knock-down gorgeous with great tits” – but the worst part of it was, she couldn’t say that to anybody, which is really infuriating.  

When she and I had our first set-to – which wasn’t long; I think it was my third day of prep – I went to her trailer, and she was doing shit like throwing things at the A.D., and just acting out in all kinds of ways.  I said to her, “Look, Kate, I know what you’re angry about, and if you want to talk about it, I’m here to talk about it.  But in the meantime, don’t take it out on all these kids.  Take it out on me.  Call and scream at me, that’s what I’m here for.”  She just got up and walked out of the trailer, and she never said a word to me again.

Can we talk about the Bill Cosby pilot you produced?  Top Secret?

Oh, god.  Pull my wings off, baby.  [Laughs.]  That was for Sheldon Leonard.  Working with Shelly was one of the great experiences of my career.  Working with Cosby was not.

Was that an attempt to rekindle the magic of I Spy?

I Spy, yeah.  Shelly wanted to do it with a woman.  He’d gotten very annoyed with [Robert] Culp when they were doing the original I Spy series, because he had cast Culp as a very buttoned-down, competent man.  The minute the show took off Cosby suddenly was a comet rising in the heavens, and Culp wanted to be hip and happenin’ too.  Sheldon kept saying, “No, no, no, that’s not the way this works,” and Culp kept ignoring him.  So by the end of it Sheldon was not Culp’s biggest fan.  He thought, we’ll do it this time with a woman.  And that seemed to work fine.  

We ran into some problems, one of which is that Cosby really has trouble saying the lines the way they’re written.  It’s part of his process.  He has to run it through his own filter and make it his own.  But if he’s working with actors who don’t know how to improvise, it becomes very difficult.  They try to follow as best they can, but it’s tough.  And he was just really unpleasant to work with.

Then we, unfortunately, ended up with a director that we should not, that I should not, have hired, who didn’t know what he was doing.

Paul Leaf, whom I’d never heard of.

You never heard of him, and I hold myself partially responsible for that.  Because he was in way over his head.  He’d done one two-hour movie called Sgt. Matlovich vs. the U.S. Air Force, about the prosecution of a gay soldier, and it was pretty good.  Unfortunately this was an action comedy, and he just didn’t have the faintest idea what the hell to do.  Plus he had Cosby, which is tough for any director, much less a relatively new one.  And he wouldn’t listen to anybody, this director.  Shelly had directed an awful lot of stuff, and I had done enough shows that I knew basically how to help him, and he didn’t want any help.  Shelly kept saying to me, “We’ll fix it in the cutting room,” and I said, “I can’t cut what I haven’t got.”  

When NBC saw the picture, the head of development said to me, “What happened to that really good script that we sent over to Rome?”  It was not fun at all.

But Sheldon Leonard left a favorable impression, at least.

Shelly was the best.  He just was gracious and smart and tough.  I just adored him.  It made the time in Italy livable.  Because the days were awful, but the nights were – and my wife is waving her hand, because she went over there with me.  We weren’t married at the time, and the minute she heard that I was going to Rome for three and a half months, she invited herself.  She had a swell time.

Cosby wasn’t mixing her drinks, I hope.

No.  It’s funny, he used to come by the room almost every night.  He was working on a bit, and he would come down and run it for me.  It never occurred to me that he came down to the room hoping that I’d be out!  By the way, he worked on this thing for at least the three months we were together, and I saw him perform it on the Carson show for the first time.  This was his genius.  I’d been listening to the thing for three months, [and] it was like he was making it up as he was going along.  Talk about being in the moment.

What did you mean when you said he was unpleasant, though?  More than his method of working?

We had a moment during the first or second week of shooting.  We were all sitting around in the hotel one night, and Cosby went off on a riff about how Hal Holbrook was an overrated actor.  I looked at him and said, “Bill, where did you get your doctorate?”  

He said, “The University of Massachusetts.  Why do you ask?”  

I said, “Well, I was curious about the university that offers a PhD in Everything.”  

The room got very quiet.  He glared at me and I stared right back.  He finally got up and walked out of the room.  

From that point on, he kept coming and asking my opinion about stuff.  I guess I was one of the few people that would tell him to go fuck himself, and he didn’t quite know how to deal with that.

Was it just a coincidence that Holbrook came up, or was it intended as a shot at you, since you were associated with him from The Senator?

Oh, I’m sure that it was a shot at me.  But that’s what I mean about unpleasant.  Camille [Cosby’s wife] was there, and the whole time we were there, he was hitting on [a woman connected to the production].  He kept hitting on her, hitting on her, and she had absolutely no interest in him.  One night Bill said, “I’m taking everybody out for dinner,” so we all met in the lobby at eight o’clock, and [the woman] wasn’t there.  

We said, “Where is she?”  

Bill said, “Oh, she wasn’t feeling well.”  

But he had told her that we were leaving at 8:30, so she came downstairs to find an absolutely empty lobby.  Didn’t know where anybody had gone.  That’s Bill.

You think he was punishing her for rejecting him?

Exactly.

Shelly subsequently got the two guys [Cosby and Culp] together to do what I thought was a really cool idea, which was to bring the two of them together because both their kids had gone to work for the CIA, and they’re being protective fathers.  He wanted me to write it and I said, “No way, Shelly, you’ll never get me within a hundred yards of that man again.”  Now, as far as Shelly was concerned, Bill could do no wrong.

Really?

Yeah.  They basically adored one another.

I’m just wondering if you think Sheldon was turning a blind eye to Cosby’s behavior.  He had to be, right?

It may have been that.  You don’t want to hear bad things about your kids, and that’s how he felt about Cosby.  You know, I Spy was the first casting of a black lead in a dramatic television series.  It was a real milestone, and Shelly fought like a sonofabitch to get him the role.  And was very proud that he was able to do it.

He was right about Cosby’s talent, of course.

Oh, yeah.  And the charisma was just incredible.  The reason for the show’s success was Bill.  I mean, Culp was always a journeyman actor.  I’m sure it struck Culp the same way that the casting of Farrah struck Kate Jackson: “What happened to my show?”

Robert Culp did have a reputation as one of Hollywood’s great egomaniacs.

Oh, yeah.  There’s a quick story: Years and years and years ago, the first job I had working on The Chrysler Theater, we were doing a Rod Serling script [“A Slow Fade to Black”] about a Hollywood tycoon.  Rod’s version of The Last Tycoon.  Rod Steiger was playing the lead, and Culp had a small role in it.  We went on the set one morning, and there was Culp with a bunch of pages.  He had rewritten his scene with Steiger.  The producer, Dick Berg, took a look at it, dropped it in the waste can, said “Thank you very much, Bob,” and walked off the set.  But that was Culp then!  That was pre-I Spy.

Mrs. Columbo brought you back together with one of your mentors, and one of my favorite forgotten television writers, Richard Alan Simmons.

Yes.  I had just gotten back from Italy, and I get a call one day from Richard.  He says, “David, I got bad news and worse news. You know that awful idea that we heard from Link and Levinson about Mrs. Columbo?”  

I said, “Yeah, it’s a terrible idea.”  

He said, “Well, I’m going to be doing it.”  

I said, “What’s the worse news?”  

He said, “I ain’t going to be doing it alone.”  

And there I was.  Because there was nothing in the world he could ask that I wouldn’t say yes to.  It would have worked if we could have cast Maureen Stapleton.  That’s who everybody saw as Mrs. Columbo.  Not Freddy Silverman!  Peter [Falk] went berserk.  He didn’t like the idea of Mrs. Columbo anyhow, but now it looks like he’s Woody Allen – you know, that he’s married to this girl who’s young enough to be his daughter.  Kate Mulgrew was a nice actor, but there was just no way to overcome the premise.

Richard Alan Simmons suggested to me that he wrote a lot of himself into the Henry Jones character, the newspaper editor.

Oh, really?  Well, the Henry Jones character made sense.  The Mrs. Columbo character made no sense at all.  What’s she doing?  She’s a housewife.  To have her as a neighborhood reporter at least gave her some kind of excuse to go poking her nose around.  But it was such a stretch.  [Simmons] had done the last two or three seasons of Columbo, and did some absolutely brilliant, brilliant shows.  And then to have to – [Mrs. Columbo] just was one of those ideas that wasn’t ever going to work.  On the other hand, it gave us the chance to spend some quality time together.

The two horror telefilms that you and Simmons did with Louis Jourdan, Fear No Evil and Ritual of Evil, still have a cult following.

He only did one.  Excuse me sir, he only did one of them!  I did the other one.  I worked on the first one with him, which is where we got to know one another.  Then the studio wanted another version, because they kind of liked the whole idea of the psychiatrist and the occult.  They assigned it to some old-time producer [William Frye] who’d worked with Ross Hunter, I think, and he was having just a terrible time trying to figure out a story.  I said to Sheinberg, “I’ve got a story for it.  Let me produce it.”  

He said, “Produce it my ass.  Go and tell it to him.”  

So I dutifully went down and told him my idea, and he thought it was just terrible.  I couldn’t understand why he didn’t like my idea.  It was a perfectly reasonable idea, based on Indian beliefs that when you take a picture of someone you steal their soul.

About three weeks later he called Sheinberg and said, “I can’t lick it.”  Sheinberg called me and said, “You know that idea you had?  How fast could you get us a script?”  

So at age 28 I became the youngest TV movie producer around.

We haven’t covered your early days at Universal in any detail.  Can we end at the beginning?

I came out of the University of Missouri with my journalism degree.  I wrote up a resume and took it around to all the studios, not knowing a soul, and got a call from the Universal publicity department.  They wanted somebody to train to write publicity blurbs.  So off I went to the publicity department.  I was so thrilled to be on the lot.  Then subsequently I moved to the Revue [Productions, the studio’s television arm] mailroom, which was a different operation, and started writing stories and taking them around on my mail runs.  Dropping them off in people’s offices.  I sold a couple.

That explains your early story credits on episodes of Leave It to Beaver and McHale’s Navy.  Was that common practice for mailroom employees?  Were you risking anyone’s wrath?

Nobody ever said anything about it one way or the other.  I wasn’t doing it covertly.  

People ask me how did I get started, and my response is I knocked up my wife.  About a month after I’ve started in the mailroom, my wife is teaching in Long Beach.  I’m commuting from Long Beach to Universal every day.  Loads of fun.  I come home one day and she announces that she’s pregnant.  I am making a fast sixty-five bucks a week, and she’s going to have to quit teaching after her fifth month, because god forbid the children should see a bump and want to know where it came from.  This is back in the early sixties.

Meanwhile, we don’t know anybody out here, so I call back home and say to my mother, “Who do you know who’s on the West Coast that can take care of a baby?”  She gives me a name and a number and we make the appointment.  It’s someplace on Wilshire Boulevard and Roxbury, and we go over there and go up to the penthouse, and sitting in the waiting room is Janet Leigh.  The rug is maybe three inches thick.  There are oil paintings on all the walls.  I suddenly realized that this guy we’ve been sent to is the OB/GYN to the stars.  So I say to my wife, “Let’s get out of here.  We can’t afford this guy.”

She says, “Well, he knew your father, and we’re here.  We can afford to pay for one appointment.”  

She goes in and gets an examination, and then the doctor calls me back to his office.  I said, “Look, before we go any further, we’re going to need the name of another doctor, because I can’t afford you.”

He looked at me and said, “You think I’m going to charge you?”  It turns out he was very close to my father.  My father had been very helpful to him during the war.  He says to me, “What are you doing?”  

I said, “I’m in the mailroom at Universal, but I’m going to have to find a real job.”  

He said, “Do you want to do that?”  

I said, “Not particularly, but I’ve got a baby on the way.”  

He said, “Well, one of my closest friends is a guy named Jerry Gershwin,” and my jaw drops, because Jerry Gershwin is Lew Wasserman’s right hand man.  He says, “Let me talk to Jerry and see if we can get you out of the mailroom.”  

It took nine months, because there was only one job I wanted.  They kept coming up with other ways for me to get out of the mailroom, but I wanted to go to work for a man named Dick Berg, who was producing The Chrysler Theater, which was a very prestigious show.  That was the show that I wanted to work on, and I really wasn’t interested in working on anything else.  They kept pressing and pressing and finally somebody gave the okay for Dick to hire me as a gofer.  That was the start.  I was really in the door, and the two years I spent with him were one of the great learning experiences of my life.    

When I watched the pilot for Nikita in 2010 and saw your name in the credits, I remember thinking, “That couldn’t be the same David Levinson, could it…?”

That was Craig Silverstein’s show.  On The Invisible Man I came in – the executive producer of the show had quit.  They were already in production.  They had no scripts.  They had no stories.  The executive producer had had enough of the executive at [The Sci-Fi Channel], and he just up and quit: “Fuck it.”  And they were desperate.  Somehow I got a call.  It was getting to be the captain of the Titanic, and I couldn’t turn that down.  I had stayed away from science fiction my entire career.  I don’t like it.  But this seemed like an opportunity just to really be busy, and an impossible situation.  And I walked into the office the first day, and there was Craig, 25 or 26 years old, sitting alone in the writers’ room staring at a blank board.  That was the beginning of our friendship.

When he sold his first show, Standoff, he called me and said, “You’ve got to come work on it.”  I had retired by that time.  I didn’t want to do it any more.  I’d been gone from it for about three years and I was really enjoying myself.  Ultimately, I couldn’t say no to him.  Then when Nikita came along, we kind of worked on the pilot.  He would come up here and talk it out with me.  When the show sold, this one I wanted to get involved with, because I thought it would really be fun.  But it’s real hard to be a crew member after you’ve been a captain.  And I don’t think I was as deferential as I might have been.  Like: “That’s the worst fuckin’ idea I’ve ever heard!”  But thank goodness our friendship survived it all.  Because in the final analysis, that’s what you take away from the career, is the people that you were with.

The top image of David Levinson, who maintains that he has no photographs of himself at work during the years we discussed, is taken with gratitude from Inside Division: The New Nikita, a making-of documentary on the DVD and Blu-ray of Nikita: Season 1.

Lotsa Teeth: An Interview With Leigh Chapman

Quotable lines and hard action were the trademarks of a Leigh Chapman script.  Or at least that’s true to the extent you can find common threads running through the resume of a screenwriter who saw herself as a craftsman and a pro, and whose credits are a tangle of rewrites and early drafts worked over by other hands.  Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, Chapman’s signature film, is about half hers (the other half is an interesting story), and The Octagon has her dialogue.  The others, at least the ones you’ve heard of, are mostly patch jobs, and you can watch them and play the unwinnable game of trying to guess which lines might be Chapman’s.

Largely averse to introspection, at least when it came to her work, Chapman struck the sort of primitive-artist pose that reminded me of the early Hollywood auteurs, like Howard Hawks (Chapman’s not-quite mentor) and John Ford.  For them it was somehow unmanly to admit to anything poetic or confessional, or even intentional or calculated, in the work.  And yet, while she had few passion projects on her resume (really none; the handful of personal screenplays were never filmed), Chapman did manage to choose her genre and stick to it.  The films that carry her name are all adventure stories, tinged with suspense, larded with violence, streaked with pulp.  Chapman’s sense of fun and her refusal to take anything very seriously tend to push them towards camp.  Even the television episodes that she she wrote early in her career bear her sense of mischief: in both Burke’s Law and The Wild Wild West, the only series for which she wrote more than one script, Chapman took her greatest pleasure in figuring out the mechanics of her characters’ deaths.

And her relatively sparse credits don’t tell the whole story: Add in the voluminous unmade projects (compiled in an appendix below) and you get the full picture, which is that Chapman was a sought-after specialist in a lucrative strain of Hollywood product.  In 1974, near the beginning of the decade or so during which she worked non-stop, Chapman gave an interview to The Hollywood Reporter in which she shrugged off the feminist movement, an attitude so out of fashion at the time that it prompted a barbed rebuttal from comedy writer Joanna Lee.  Chapman’s disinclination toward positioning herself as any kind of pioneer undersells the difficulty of the career transitions she pulled off – from contract starlet to television writer to movie script doctor – all the while surrounded by rich and famous alpha males.

In one sense, given her utter indifference to dates and details, Leigh was a journalist’s nightmare.  She plowed through life like one of her heroines, not stopping to take names or fret over broken furniture (literally, in the case of her fling with Harlan Ellison).  Once I tossed aside my notes and gave up on the notion of delving into the minutiae of her scripts, I discovered that Chapman’s sharp wit and startling candor made my interview with her one of the most vivid that I’ll ever do.

As I wrote last week, Leigh and I were on the same wavelength from the start, and our initial meeting in April 2009 was supplemented by lengthy follow-ups over the telephone and by email.  Fresh anecdotes trickled in as late as six months prior to Leigh’s death, from cancer, in November 2014.  The email material filled in so many crucial gaps that I am loathe to omit or merely footnote it, but because Chapman’s prose style was a bit different from her manner of speaking, I have rendered the portions of her remarks that came from emails rather than from our conversations in dark red.

So why don’t you remember anything about your days as an actress?

I think I just I hated being in front of a camera and I just sort of went into shock, you know?

What made you do it, then?

Well, I came to L.A.  I got married a couple weeks after graduation from college.  College was a girls’ school called Winthrop College in Rock Hill, South Carolina.  I did four years in three to get out of there.  My [future] ex-husband, his family lived in a nearby town.  He was at Duke.  We went out on a blind date and then he’d come down every weekend, and I’d sneak out.  I mean, it doesn’t matter now, but they would expel you for having a drink.  Oh, it was horrifying.  So Jerry was my salvation.  We both graduated at the same time, and the issue was, considering my parents, how can we manage to be together on the same kind of level that we have been, unless we get married?  Answer: we can’t.  So we got married.  He came from a wealthy family – my family was poor.  Hs father wanted him to be a doctor, and he didn’t want to do that.  He wanted to go to night school.  I got a B.A. in French.  I figured I was less prone to fall back if I had nothing to fall back on.  Except for French, I wasn’t interested in the courses.  I was interested in reading all the books that were not available to me to read in my little teeny town, okay?  So I did all this extracurricular reading, and was doing plays.  The plan was kind of that Jerry would go to med school and I would become one of these ivory tower intellectuals.  Then all of a sudden one day he said, “I want to be an actor.  Let’s go to Los Angeles.”

Were you on board with that?

Oh, absolutely!  Are you kidding?  Wow.  So, we came out here, and his father was . . . very displeased with him for having done this, and so he cut off the funds.  I absolutely understand why he did it.  But since Jerry had never, ever been allowed to work – it was, you get a new convertible every year, all you have to do is just make decent grades, get into med school, and party.  So he was totally unequipped for Los Angeles.  We had no money, and I think it was four days into being in Los Angeles – yeah, I went to an employment agency, and I was relying on high school typing.  I ended up interviewing at William Morris.  It was working for an attorney, and I came back and said “I don’t think I want to work there.  He’s so stuffy.”  And [at the employment agency] they’re going, “Are you insane?  Your husband wants to be an actor, and they’re offering you a job at William Morris, and you don’t want to take it?”  I go, “Oh.  Yeah, I guess I’d better.”  So I did.  

Luckily, the attorney that I worked for would rather discuss philosophy than do his work, which is the only reason, I’m sure, that I did not get fired.

So your boss was an attorney, not an agent, at William Morris?

Yes.  And I shouldn’t say this, but I would do things like, there would be some huge law firm that would call and leave a message, and I would just forget to tell him about the message.  I mean, it wasn’t for me, you know?  But we had these long philosophical discussions, and my typing was adequate.  

Then, after about a year, I realized that I felt that our lives should go in separate directions.  So I’m the bad guy who said, “I want a divorce.”  My ex-husband was wonderful.  He did nothing wrong.  I actually think I’m allergic to marriage, also.  

So there I was.  I’d minored in drama in college, and I wasn’t equipped to do anything else.  I certainly wasn’t going to continue to be a secretary, so they let me sneak out for some acting interviews, and I got hired.  That was it.  I did two stage plays (Neil Simon) [Come Blow Your Horn (1963) and Under the Yum Yum Tree (1964), both at the Ivar Theatre in Hollywood]. Not amateur stuff.  Professional, paid-for gigs. The reality of theatre – doing the same thing night after night wrecked any romantic notions I had about theatre. I learned, oh, God, I have to do this again?  For another month?  If it’s not new and exciting, it’s not for me.

I was dating a writer, and he paid me to type some scripts.  And as of about script number six, I thought, “You know, I think I understand how this works.”  And I watched the show, a particular show, to check out the format, and wrote a script and sold it.

What show was it?

It was Burke’s Law.  I did a couple of acting gigs on it.  So maybe that’s why I chose that show.

How does Edward J. Lakso fit into this?

That was the writer that I was dating that I was typing scripts for.  I think he has claimed that he taught me how to write.  You can’t, in my opinion, teach someone how to write.  He was writing for Combat at that time; logic tells me that it was Combat scripts I was typing.

Did he write for Burke’s Law?  Is Lakso where you got sample scripts from that show?

Oh, no, I watched the show, and analyzed.  And I would get TV Guide and I would look through the plotlines, to see what they had done or had not done . . . . I just picked Burke’s Law because I liked it, and then Shirley said, “Oh, I put it on so-and-so’s desk.”  I had a roommate who was still working at William Morris, and she gave it to the associate producer there, and I’m so sorry that I don’t remember his name, because he was a very nice man.  Anyway, this gentleman [likely Richard Newton] read it, and had me in for a meeting.  He said, “Look, I like the way you write.  I think x, y, and z needs to be changed a little bit, and if you’re willing to make those changes without any guarantee that I will buy the script, then make the changes and come back in.”

So I made the changes, went back in, they bought the script, and I went out and bought a Corvette.

You did say that in one interview at the time – that after you sold your first script, you bought a convertible.

Yes.  Was the first one a convertible, or the second one?  Doesn’t matter.  I bought a Corvette.  I mean, I thought that was one of my better decisions.

Just think if you still had that car today.

Oh, I know!  I watch the muscle-car things.  If I had either one of those Corvettes . . . . The very first one was a white Corvette.  The second one was a gray one.  And you know who bought the second one?  Barry Diller.  He was working in the mailroom at William Morris.

I just knew I wanted a convertible.  And it had to be a Corvette.  I mean, I rented my roommate’s car for a year, because I was not going to have a car until I could have a Corvette.  Cars, oh, man, when I get obsessed with a car – I wish there were cars I wanted now.  I’d probably be writing.  I’m serious.  When I’d get obsessed with a car, I’d figure out a way to make the money to get the car.  I’ve only had a few cars, but they’ve all been special cars.  And yes, I wish to god I had that ’Vette back.  Holy shit, what they sell for.  After that came a Facel Vega, which you probably have never heard of.  It was a Facel Vega II.  They only made 212.  Ringo Starr had one.  I sold a car that was in parts, where the engine had seized up, everything had deteriorated, about twelve years ago for $50,000.  Then after that I had a Pantera.  I [sold] it on a whim.  Hung up the phone, cried.  I never cry over men, but I cried [over a car]: “Why did I sell that?”  But my ethics are such that I gave my word, and I couldn’t go back on it.

Chapman loved fast cars, but never put her in a Porsche.

Had you done any writing at all before television?

No.  I mean, I did love books, always.  There might have been some kind of a latent desire to do some writing.  I read Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, and he wrote that when he was like 21, and then I read The Fountainhead.  It was, all of a sudden, I’m not as insane as people think I am.  This person has said, and much better than I ever could, all the things that I believe in.  All the precepts by which I wish to live my life.  So, having read that, I went: I don’t have a chance.  

Then also there was this essay contest in a philosophy [class].  I entered this contest, and I didn’t win.  I was absolutely devastated.  I thought, okay, that means you can’t write.  Now what I didn’t factor in was – I’ve already sort of described the kind of school I went to?  Well, I wrote a paper in favor of Buddhism.  Where the girl who won wrote a normal Christianity thing.  I don’t know if that factored into it.  So that was my only attempt at writing.  I wanted to be a fashion designer, and the subject of writing didn’t come up again until I typed those scripts.

Do you remember the process you went through to write that first script?

Well, apparently I do have a rather analytical mind, so I watched a couple of episodes and sort of figured out what the format was.  You know, the act breaks, and then I had learned the basic format from typing five or six scripts.  And came up with an idea.  I don’t remember much about that first idea, except that it did have its origins in the south.  Back there chickens had bands around the chicken’s leg, and somehow that figured into the murder plot.  That was one of the murder clues.

Then you did a second Burke’s Law, “Who Killed Wimbledon Hastings?”

Oh, okay, that was the exploding tennis ball.  You know, I just sit down and kind of go, what if?  This was funny.  I was doing research: can you make a tennis ball explode?  But when somebody’s serving, they bounce it.  So how could you rig this?  So I called some firm in downtown Los Angeles and started asking questions about explosives, and somehow convinced them that I legitimately was a writer and was not going to use this for any nefarious purposes.  They told me how I could concoct a tennis ball that would do that.  So that’s all I remember about that show.

Some of your earliest work was done for MGM and Arena Productions – obviously as an actress on The Man From U.N.C.L.E., but also in Norman Felton’s other show, Dr. Kildare.  Did you have a connection there, or was that a coincidence?

I think I was in an acting class at MGM for a little while, but no, it was strictly a coincidence.  If you ask me did I ever date Robert Vaughn, yes.  But that was after, after, I was off the show.

And you also wrote for Dr. Kildare.

I don’t think it got shot.  It was a two-person thing.  I decided to pull Kildare out of the hospital and put him in some remote place, with somebody in jeopardy.  I think that that’s when Kildare was actually about to go off the air.

The producer of Dr. Kildare, Douglas Benton, said in an interview, “Leigh Chapman writes very hip dialogue.”

Oh, that was always my strong suit.  Plot, or structure, really, is my weakness.  But dialogue is my strong suit.

Chapman thought The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1965-66) made her look better in black and white than in color.

Did you ever try to write for The Man From U.N.C.L.E.?

No.  It hadn’t occurred to me at that point.

But you would have been writing professionally by the time you were appearing on The Man From U.N.C.L.E., right?

I don’t know.  Look, I’m not trying to be coy, but – I didn’t even wear a watch until I was in my thirties.  So I have no dates [in my memory].  I only did the show for a year.  Then – and this is very sweet of Vaughn, because he protested – another producer came in, and that producer had a girlfriend, so I got replaced.

By his girlfriend?

Yeah.  Whoever that was, and I don’t know.  I never met her.  

Well, that’s a shame.  And of course I wish you could remember her name, and the producer’s.

All I know is, they went from black and white to color, and I looked much better in black and white than I did in color.  Somebody who was very, very into Man From U.N.C.L.E., and wrote a book about it, did what you did, and asked me if I would do an interview.  I didn’t watch the shows, but he had video clips.  When I saw what I looked like in black and white, that was a lot of makeup and false eyelashes and stuff, and I thought, “Holy shit, I looked pretty good.”  Then when the color ones came on, I thought, “Oh, I’m not as dramatic.”

Tell me what you remember about being on the set of The Man From U.N.C.L.E..

I was Napoleon Solo’s secretary.  Sometimes Vaughn would be in the shot, or I think once in a while he was kind enough to be off-camera to deliver his lines.  But I don’t know how to explain this, because I don’t exactly know – I was good at cold readings.  But once the camera was on me, I hit my mark and I did what I was supposed to do, but I had no concept of how close the camera was.  Basically I kind of went into shock.  Logic says I should remember being on the set.  I don’t.  Not in ANY of the shows I was in.  I was on overload and went into auto-pilot. (No trouble remembering lines or hitting my mark or taking direction…but it wasn’t I who was doing that. It was this creature called Leigh Chapman.)  I didn’t notice my surroundings.  I wish I had.  Or do I wish I had?  No, because I don’t want to be an actress.  I don’t want to share myself.  I can’t think of anything worse than being famous.  I never wanted that.

When did you start dating Robert Vaughn?

After I was no longer on The Man From U.N.C.L.E..  There was a guy that I had worked for some at William Morris named Peter [Allan] Fields.  He became a writer also.  Peter and Vaughn became close friends.  Except for one situation, my business life was always entirely separate from my private life.

Was Fields the lawyer you had worked for at William Morris?

He’s not the first one I worked for, he was the second one.  Peter quit the law job and I think he was writing some Man From U.N.C.L.E.s, and he and Vaughn became friends.  And Peter and I remained friends.  I remember it was Peter who told me Robert tried very hard to keep me on the show, but, you know, what do you do?  And I thought, well, that’s very nice.  So at some point after that, I was around Vaughn and he asked me out.  His face has such a stern persona.  Off camera, he was very funny.  Peter used to call him Porky Pig, which delighted him.  

I always lived in rented houses, houses I should have bought, but I didn’t want to be tied down.  But he and Peter were over at my house one night, in the kitchen, and I remember Vaughn saying, “Today I became a millionaire.”  And then I dated him a few times and I realized what it was like.  I mean, he couldn’t get through dinner without somebody wanting an autograph.  He was just besieged.  And while I enjoyed him – I enjoyed dating him – but before I dated him, I had one really obsessive love affair.  I remember I was in San Francisco with him, and I had to say, “Robert, I’m in love with somebody else.”  I had to end it.

Peter Allan Fields also described you as his “lady friend” at the time of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

We were friends.  I dated Peter a few times somewhere in there.  But I was never – it wasn’t what I would have called a serious relationship.  He said I was his “lady friend”?  Well, that’s basically right.  I was never formally his girlfriend, but I went out with him a few times.  And then we stayed friends for some years after that.  On an occasional basis, we would see each other, but it was just a platonic thing.

As long as we’re talking about relationships, you also dated Harlan Ellison.  [Ellison mentions being “deeply involved” with Chapman, “a dynamite redhead,” in his Los Angeles Free Press column of March 21, 1969, collected in The Glass Teat.] 

I happened to be at WGA HQ one day at the same time Harlan was there and he asked me out. I had a personal relationship with him for … three months? six months?  Harlan is one of the most intelligent/well-read, high-energy people I’ve ever met. We had a lot of fun. At the time I was with him, he was working on “A Boy And His Dog,” which is probably one of my favorite things he ever wrote. (Geez, his titles were stunning). So why did I break up with him? I think I wasn’t ready to be a “grownup” and concern myself with whether or not I closed a kitchen cabinet … or used a silicone wax (horrors) on his cherrywood kitchen table (in an effort to help him get ready for some party he was having). Did he ever treat me badly or yell at me or something? No, but he sure was upset over that table. And I’m thinking, “Dude … it’s not as if I ruined it.”  What I’m trying to say is that it was just little tiny things where our habits didn’t mesh.  I do not regret one moment of the time I spent with him and … I hope he isn’t upset with me for the circumstances under which I pulled an adios. I did not handle that in a graceful way. Mea culpa.

If you were aware that you didn’t like acting, why did you go along with being groomed as a starlet?  You were under contract for a brief time at Screen Gems, which put you in shows like The Monkees and Occasional Wife.

It was just one of those spontaneous moves that I made.  My life was full of these good and bad spontaneous decisions.  There was a screen test, and . . . I didn’t realize what it was going to entail.  They thought that I was going to be the next Katharine Hepburn.  My screen test was from The Philadelphia Story.  Of course, they weren’t doing any sitcoms that had anything to do with Katharine Hepburn.  And furthermore, I had to go to an acting class at the studio.  Well, I mean, I felt like I was in high school all over again.  It was like, wait a fucking minute, I’m a grown-up.  But I had to go to these acting classes.  Yeah, I did those parts, and I was glad – the contract lasted, what, six months or something, and I was glad when it got dropped.  

Mostly you played supporting parts, but during that Screen Gems contract you were the primary guest star in an episode of Iron Horse.

Yes.  You know, that was the one moment when I really, really understood what I was going to have to do in front of the camera.  There was some brief moment when I wasn’t even certain when the camera was running, . . . and I remember I turned and it was a close-up.  I was caught off-guard.  Because I didn’t even think there was film in the camera.  I just turned, as me.  Then for some reason I did see that show afterwards, watched that show, and I looked at that and I thought, “Uh-oh.  That’s the one true moment that exists [of me] on film.  And this is what I will have to do.  I will have to drop all the guards in order to be a truly successful actress.”

Before we leave your acting career behind, you also did some TV commercials.

I do remember shooting a hair commercial (Toni Home Permanent?) because the cinematographer was James Wong Howe and that’s when my hair was cut short and dyed platinum (without my being forewarned). Also, during what I assume was that time frame, I remember a Tareyton cig[arette] commercial and a car commercial. (Chevy?) I remember the latter because I asked the director why he hired me, because I thought the girl who auditioned right before me was prettier. His reply: “Because when you smile, your mouth turns up at the corners.”  The kicker? He never shot a closeup.

Chapman played a movie star on The Monkees (1966) – a role she had no interest in in real life.

The ingenue-slash-writer angle was novel.  I found five or six magazine profiles of you that were published in the sixties.

Were there that many?  I remember the one in TV Guide.

Let me check a few facts from those clippings, if I may.  Were you in fact a tomboy as a child?

Yes.  It was very hard to be a tomboy, because my father didn’t approve of that kind of stuff.  I was supposed to be very ladylike, and that just wasn’t me.  Hey, I’m an adrenaline junkie.  Give me something exciting to do, where I can risk life and limb, and I’m happy.  I lived for sports, basketball.  There was one girls’ football game, and I remember there was this whole big thing in my house.  My father was like, “Girls don’t do that!”  “I’m playing!”  It was a whole mess.  However: it was supposed to be like touch football?  But this was the highlight of everything.  As much as I loved basketball, this was still the highlight.  It was a charity game, and we trained and had the varsity helmets and all that shit.  And I was the quarterback.  We were playing the girls from Clemson College, which was five miles away, and we hated those chicks.  So it sort of evolved into tackling and things like that.  And I remember I threw the winning pass to my best girlfriend, and we won, six to nothing.

You make that sound like that might be your proudest accomplishment.

In high school, yes.  I’m trying to think of how that ranks along scuba diving.  I’m not sure, let’s swing with that, okay?

Did you in fact break your nose four times?

Yeah.  The first time was by accident, in grammar school.  I was riding piggyback or something, and again it involved my best friend.  I don’t know, we got slammed, and I just remember my nose was bleeding, and I go home and say, “Mom, I think I broke my nose.  Look at this bump.”  You must understand, we didn’t exactly have money to spend on doctors.  And she [said], “Oh, no, that’s just . . . .”  She wasn’t uncaring, it’s just, oh, that’ll go away.  Then through basketball and so forth I managed to break it a couple more times.  Oh, yeah, you know, I didn’t get voted regional all-star my senior year because the coaches thought I was too mean.  But I was a much better player my senior year, and I never, ever started a fight.  If somebody else played dirty or started one, I was going to finish it.  If at all possible.  But I never played dirty.  My mother would come down at halftime and say, “Leigh, you look angry.  Take that expression off your face.”  And I’d go, “Mother, I’m trying to win a game here.”

And you had plastic surgery to fix your nose when you first came to Los Angeles?

Oh, yeah.  Well, I had this like witch’s hump.  I had a high school teacher – well, two of them, actually – who said, “Oh, you should enter the Miss America contest.”  This was when I was going off to college.  I’m going, “Have you looked at my nose?  Do you realize what this thing looks like?”  And it led to – maybe it was just an excuse, I don’t know.  But it led to a pretty long period of low self-esteem.  Because even if you have your nose fixed, you still have a residual memory of what you looked like with that nose.  And yes, I won all these kind of stupid contests – I say stupid now; they were important to me at the time.  Class president, homecoming queen, beauty queen, all those things.  But I think that it had to do more with my personality than it did really with the way I looked.

Kannapolis, North Carolina is your birthplace?

Yes.  It’s like 25 miles from Charlotte, and then we moved to central South Carolina.  But my grandfather was the chief of police in Kannapolis, so I spent some summers there, and life was wonderful.  He loaned me his car, and I could drive it in the street and nobody was going to bust me because he was the chief of police.

I’ve read articles where you described it as an idyllic southern childhood out of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Oh, I did.  That is one of my favorite films.  No, it wasn’t a happy childhood, but the part of Atticus Finch that was tall and shot the mangy rabid dog, that was my father.  I have only a few good memories of my father.  He used to take me quail hunting.  But then, I don’t know how old I was, about the time I could have had a rifle, but all of a sudden all that went away and I had to be a girl.  I can’t give you the age at which that happened, but he no longer took me hunting.  I remember one time, there was a steep mountain thing, and some stream that I was not capable of crossing by myself.  I don’t know why that would be, considering the things I do, but I was just too young.  He had to carry me across this river, stream, whatever.  I don’t know whether that was an imposition to him, I don’t know whether it was a key moment – “Let’s leave this thing behind.”  You know, she’s a burden.  Or just that he decided I was too old to be a tomboy and I had to become a girl.  I don’t know.  

But those were the only good times I remember with my father, because to tell you the truth, I can see now why my father and I couldn’t possibly get along.  Religion was a big factor, but he was a loner.  He was a handsome man, but he didn’t talk, you know.  So his word was law.  My mother was the one who was genteel and nourishing and wanted me to be a lady and get married and be a schoolteacher and lead a safe life.  They were very responsible.  But there was nothing touchy-feely.  You just didn’t do that.  It’s just the religion; everything was so strict.  You can’t do this, you can’t do that.  I couldn’t go swimming on Sundays.  Sunday was the Lord’s day.  Shit, you know?  They were parents of their time, and because our town was so small, my every move was watched.  And no voices were ever raised in our house.  All my mother had to do was to raise her eyebrow of disapproval and all of us would go, “[Uh-oh].”  So that’s why I say it wasn’t happy.  Because I didn’t fit in.  Just because of my nature, I always felt so suffocated.  I had to make a choice: do I want to be who I am, or who they want me to be?  

Is your real name in fact Rosa Lee Chapman?

[Shudders.]  I mean, where in the south, do you come up with Rosa?  That’s not a southern name.  

Lee is a southern name, of course.

Well, yeah, and because I was writing all this macho stuff, I spelled it in a slightly more feminine fashion.  It was an attempt to be more female.  My bad joke was, I don’t want to be confused with Lee Marvin.  So I spell it L-E-I-G-H.

You wrote more for The Wild Wild West than anything else.  What do you remember about that show?

Oh, I loved doing Wild Wild West, because it was outrageous.  The guy I always had the story conferences with, Henry Sharp, he was so much fun, and lively.  A number of those, I think, were rewrites.  One that won an Emmy for Agnes Moorehead, although, let’s face it, Agnes Moorehead did not win an Emmy for Wild Wild West; she won an Emmy because she hadn’t won one for Bewitched.  I remember that one because it took place at a Valentine greeting card factory.  That one stuck in my mind.

What was your process for writing a Wild Wild West script?  What were the requirements for an episode of that show?

Jeez, I don’t remember.  I mean, there had to be an interesting villain.  Several of these were rewrites, so somebody else had already conceived of the original story.  I know that the Valentine card factory was definitely my original idea.  I’m not sure about the others.  Even if you tell me the titles, I wouldn’t remember.  I didn’t get to do the Dr. Loveless ones.  Those were like the property of Henry Sharp.

Somebody sent me a script to autograph in the last couple of years.  It was a Wild Wild West, and I don’t remember writing it at all, but I saw the name Oconee in there – I think it had to do with an Indian – and I thought, I had to write it, because Oconee was the lake we went to when I was a kid.  You know, I worked very hard, but writing – look, there are people who live to write, like Stephen King, and there are people who write to live.  Which is why you’d have to call me a Hollywood hack.

So you took a very pragmatic attitude toward screenwriting?

When I watched my first filmed script, I wanted to kick in the TV. “…But that’s not what I meant, not what I meant at all.”  I instantly realized that if I continued to accept money for my work, I also had to accept the fact that I had no control over it.  (I assure you I was never one of those writers who thought every word was sacrosanct … but when truly critical scenes were not even filmed, it was like a stake through my heart).  Dirty Mary was an example of that. Yes, it was entertainment … not Paddy Chayefsky stuff … but it could’ve/should’ve had a shred of meaning.

And, yes, there were times I refused the money, if it truly went against my deepest beliefs.  Nonetheless, I continued to play the Hollywood game … for the money. And the freedom that goes with having those FU $$$s.  Do I regret it? No, not really … because becoming a playwright was the only way to have control of my work … and I never came up with subject matter that I felt (a) had enough depth and/or (b) would successfully translate into a play.

One more area of clarification: … I write with a certain cadence. Brief digression: I knew, and was a big fan, of John Milius’ work. (I spent time with Milius but never as his girlfriend). Anyway, if you read [The Life and Times of] Judge Roy Bean it was, to me, glorious dialogue. The movie, however, was a flop because the actors couldn’t adjust to the dialogue (What? Paul Newman couldn’t adjust? No. Stacy Keach, as I recall, “got it.”) Second Milius example: Apocalypse Now. Without having read the script I knew exactly what had been written by Milius and what had been rewritten by Coppola. The section containing the classic “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” was pure Milius. Very little of the rest of the script has that tone. I make no good or bad judgments, just trying to establish that some writers have a voice which is distinctive and others have a “flexible voice.”  For better or worse, I belong to the former category.

What do you remember about writing for about Mission: Impossible?

That was Bruce Lansbury.  We had a lot of story conferences.  He was a very subdued gentleman.  It took a lot of story conferences to work out that plot to his satisfaction.  I just remember that, at the end, the, quote, clever thing was that the villains were at point A and trying to get to point B, and you wanted them to go to point C, and so you just switched the road signs and they ended up at point C.

Do you remember writing a Mod Squad?

I remember I did it.  I was taking Dexedrine to write, okay?  If you really want to analyze.

Dexedrine was an “upper,” right?

It’s an amphetamine.  It made me focus in, and I just became a brain, and I wrote.  I would focus in my writing.  For somebody else, it’s a party drug.  It’s a lower version of ecstasy or crystal meth or all those things.  I really don’t want to use this as an excuse [for not remembering old scripts], but I’m trying very hard to not seem evasive.

I guess it was around this time that you abruptly left Hollywood for a while.

That sounds about right.  Yes, because the National Guard got my brother, and that was ’68 or ’69.  So that was when I dropped out.

Is that what triggered it?

No, I was – it’s so silly, this unhappy love affair.  And also, I was burned out.  I was just frigging burned out, you know?  I went over for a holiday to visit him and said, “Oh, man, I like this.”  Came home, got rid of my furniture, shipped my motorcycle over, and dropped out for a year.  Then I got island fever and came home.

What was your life in Los Angeles like before that?  Were you part of the Hollywood scene, the music scene, the hippie scene?

I wasn’t doing anything.  I was just writing.  That’s what I mean about being burned out . . . . Okay, here I am in high school and everything and then I come and I start writing, but writing takes all that I have.  I didn’t go to the gym, I didn’t – during that period, no social life.  It just took it out of me.  And it wasn’t until later on – in Hawaii, I realize now, I didn’t even read a book when I was over there.  I just laid on the beach.  I totally vegged out.  When I say I did drugs, I just mean acid and shit like that.  That was interesting.  I mean, I’m glad I did it.  It was fun.  But I now look back at it, and since my brain is unruly, I try to understand the things I do.  And I can now say that all those years of taking the amphetamines, they just finally took a toll.  Because all I cared about was if the sun came out and I could lie out in the sun.  I would go swimming in the ocean, but I didn’t learn how to scuba dive.  I didn’t read any books.  I was just a total vegetable for a year.

[As I was clarifying the parameters of a related point that Chapman chose not to discuss on the record, I asked if she wished to omit her Dexedrine use as well.]

I’m not ashamed of anything that I experimented with, including PCP, angel dust, Quaaludes.  You want to put all that on the record?  Because it seems that so many kids are into the methamphetamine stuff now, and I’m not into kids.  I’m not into kids, and I’m not into all that shit.

So you never had children?

No, no.  Never wanted them.  My biological clock was digital, okay?  It manifested itself for a hot five minutes one day.  I remember sitting on the end of the bed thinking, “Wonder if my biological clock is ticking?”  I remember where I was, living with somebody in Bel Air.  When I got married, my ex-husband didn’t want children and I didn’t want children, so that wasn’t an issue [then].  And I sat on the end of the bed and I did this soul-searching: “Am I going to regret this?  Am I going to think that I missed out on something?”  And I thought, “No.”  End of subject.  And to this day, I never felt that it was my destiny to have a child.  I never saw it in my future.  I didn’t find it necessary to leave some remnant of myself behind.  So, no kids.  I mean, once they become sentient human beings, then they’re fun.  But babies gross me out.  

Chapman (far left) played a postulant nun on Combat (1964).

For a while you were doing both acting and writing, before you chose the latter for good.

Yeah.  I remember calling up William Morris one day and saying, “Listen, television is having its hiatus, and I’m like really bored.  Would you get me an acting job?”  They did, and it was for a pilot.  It was my one really miserable experience.  I don’t think it would be appropriate, maybe, to go into the details.

The pilot, was that Land’s End?  That was shot on location in Mexico.

Yesssss…!

What made it miserable?

Desi Arnaz, that fucking drunk.

Did he come on to you?

Worse.  I was emotionally abused, and physically.  He came into my room – you want to hear the story?  Fine, I’ll tell you the story.  First of all, I didn’t even know – my sense of geography sucks.  I thought Cabo San Lucas was – I thought that I could commute.  I thought that it was, oh, Tijuana or something, and I could commute and still be a writer.  And yes, it was a running part.  So we went down.  At that time, it was so many years ago, there were only several resorts, and there was no commercial airliner that flew in there.  So I couldn’t get out.  So there I am . . . . I mean, I had sort of [a] warning as to what Desi was like, William Morris had promised me that [he] wouldn’t bug me.  And his second wife was going to be on location, so I figured, hey, I’m cool.  Wrong.  The first was, the verbal drug abuse, which at least it happened inside my room, in Spanish, so I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.

“Verbal drug abuse”?

Verbal abuse.  He was accusing me of doing drugs.  The drugs, which were sitting on the table, were antibiotics, because I almost caught pneumonia going down on the plane.  And I had to do a sequence in a swimsuit the next day, in a freezing cold pool, and I knew my own body.  I had to have some antibiotics.  There really wasn’t a resident doctor, so one of the staff at the hotel got me penicillin or something.  And [Arnaz was] drunk as a lord, and pointing at this bottle and swearing at me in Spanish.  The only thing he said in English was, “I wish I’d never hired you.”  I’m thinking, “I wish you’d never hired me, too,” and took a Seconal and went to sleep.

Then I did my stuff and we moved to another location.  And I’m thinking – you have to understand how naive I was.  Just, truly, because of my background.  Just not street smart at all.  So I remember the crew and the cast were doubling up and tripling up, and I had the biggest room in the place and there was no lock on the door.  I thought: well, that’s really odd.  And then I dismissed it.  The next thing I know, I’m asleep and there’s Desi Arnaz on the side of my bed, drunk, and I’m trying to push him away.  He manages to bite me on my left boob before I can push him away.  Then I do, I shove really hard, because that hurt, man!  What did he think, that’s a turn on?  Is he nuts?  So I managed to get him over toward the door.  And this is so classic, and so just B- or C-movie, I can’t believe it: he grabbed me by my hair and pulled my head back and said, “When we get back to Los Angeles, I’m going to fuck you.”  And I thought, good luck!

So, [I] get back to Los Angeles, I call up Jerry Zeitman at the William Morris Agency.  Now, I just have this running part in this bloody pilot, right?  I call Jerry: “Look, this is what happened, and I want to tell you something.  If that pilot sells, I don’t care if he sues me.  I am not getting near that man ever again in my life.”  I mean, that was the way I felt, but who cared about me?  You know, I was the girl in the show.  Anyway, Desi was also a client at William Morris, and Zeitman said, “Hey, don’t worry about it.  We’ll take care of you.”  And the pilot didn’t sell and that’s the end of the story.  But, I mean, how tacky.  How really, really, tacky, don’t you think?

Well, I was going to ask: As a young actress at that time, were you invited onto the casting couch often?

No.  Well, look: I don’t know how to flirt.  I think that’s numero uno.  But secondly, the guys at William Morris knew how ignorant I was, and I think that they kind of took care of me.  I think that they kind of said to whomever, “Don’t mess with her.”  I think that was part of it.  There was only one person – oh, this was another sleazeball.  Marty – he was a producer.  He put Sharon Tate under contract.

Martin Ransohoff?

Ransohoff!  That pig.  I had an interview with Ransohoff, and did a screen test.  I mean, who knows if the film was really rolling.  It was on the set of some movie.  But I got paid for it.  Then he said, “I’ll let you know in a week whether or not I want to put you under contract.”  So I went into his office, and I remember he was wearing a white t-shirt, and it was all sweaty under the armpits.  There was a sofa, and I had to sit on the sofa beside him.  I don’t remember what he did, but he either put his hand on my knee or started to inch closer or something.  Because he said, “Okay, I’m interested in putting you under contract,” blah, blah, blah.  Nudge, nudge.  Then I go, “Um, no, thank you, Mr. Ransohoff.”  Because I got that game instantly.  And he said, quote: “Oh, so you’re going to do it the hard way, huh?”  I said, “Yes, Mr. Ransohoff,” and walked out the door.

One of the underlying themes of this interview is how unusual it was to be a young, female screenwriter in the sixties.  How did men in the film industry react to you as a writer?

They were far more interested in the pages than anything else, and I’d throw around a few polysyllabic words and a few quotes.  Just, I was one of the guys.  They wanted the product of my brain, and no, I never felt that – I mean, I’m told that other women were not writing action-adventure at that point.  I don’t know.  I don’t know what other women were doing.  Women don’t interest me.  But no, I was always treated with respect.

See, in the interim – it’s not on there; the movie never got made – I worked for Howard Hawks.

Really?

Yeah.  I thought that might interest you.  Somewhere in there, I can’t tell you the year, I went for an acting interview [for Red Line 7000, 1965], and he said my voice was terrible.  He told me my voice was dreadful, but something came up about writing, and he said, “I’d like to read one of your scripts.”  I said okay.  And I go back in and he gave me some voice lessons to do, to turn me into Lauren Bacall.  Well, it didn’t work.  

That’s right, Hawks had that fixation on deep-voiced women.

Yes.  He had me go home and take the ironing board, and as I spoke, I was supposed to press my stomach into the ironing board, to make my voice lower.  Well, it only lasted as long as I was pushing myself into the ironing board.  So I went back in and Hawks said, “Your voice really hasn’t improved and you’re probably a lousy actress anyway, but I like the way you write.  You want to do a script for me?”  

“Yeah.”  

See, I knew that he was a legendary director, but – now I have to backtrack again.  My hometown was like a humid green version of The Last Picture Show.  Three blocks long on one side of the street and train tracks on the other side.  The movie theater was only open a couple months a year.  My father became this fundamentalist Southern Baptist.  I was not allowed to go to movies.  Once in a while, he would maybe take me to a John Wayne movie.  So I have no background in movies.  And so therefore, I mean, Hawks was older by then, and I was young and ignorant and feisty.  In my mind he was over the hill.  

Hawks was then living in Palm Springs, and I had to go down every weekend and take my pages.  Oh, I’m grateful to him for this: he taught me how to ride dirtbikes.  I ended up buying a motorcycle.  But the reason Hawks and I got along, and there are three phases to the story, we got along because I would argue with him.  As far as I was concerned, he was an over-the-hill director.  I’m the young hip person who knows what’s going on here.  I didn’t know at that time that I was the prototypical Hawks woman, who would talk back to him.  And so we got along famously.  

What was the script you were writing for him?

Something that didn’t get made.  I don’t remember the title and I don’t have a copy of it.  It was about two guys and a female, in Vietnam, during the Vietnam war, going from point A to point B.  Supposedly he couldn’t get the military to cooperate because it wasn’t “hawkish” enough.  (Not my pun … somebody else’s.)  Dunno if that’s true but that was the reason given and also, apparently, John Wayne had The Green Berets in the works and that got made instead.

And then he wanted me to write – what was his last movie?

Rio Lobo?

Okay, he wanted me to write Rio Lobo.  But at that point I decided I was burned out and I just wanted to drop out.  And I did drop out, and lived in Hawaii for a year, so I didn’t write Rio Lobo.  [Someone] later told me, “Oh, Hawks, really, he’s so bummed.  He thinks that you did something stupid like run off and get married.”  No, Mr. Hawks, I dropped out and I was in Hawaii doing drugs, as to why I did not do Rio Lobo.  So ours was a successful working relationship, but I just wanted out for a while.

I have to ask, since he saw you in the Lauren Bacall mold, whether Hawks’s interest in you was entirely professional?

Here’s the funny thing.  He would tell me stories.  He said that he could cook better than I could, so thank god, I didn’t have to cook.  He had a son, a young son by somebody named Dee Hartford.  Sometimes I would take the son down [from Los Angeles] for the weekend.  And I do remember, this is a horrible thought, but I do remember thinking, “Oh, god, I’m down here like every weekend.  I hope he doesn’t stroke out.  I mean, shit, somebody will think I’m screwing him.”  And I did always call him Mr. Hawks, and he was always a perfect gentleman.  There was one tentative little move one night, and I said, “Mr. Hawks . . . .”  And that was the end of it.  He had much too much pride [to persist].

But he would tell me stories about Bogart and Bacall, and all these people.  And Hemingway.  And I’m sitting there thinking: I despise Hemingway.  He’d tell me about this movie called Bringing Up Baby, and it sounded so stupid.  And sometime in the last, what, ten or twelve years, I’ve caught it on cable, and I’m going, Holy shit.  Likewise Red River.  His range – I mean, I had no idea.  So it worked out really well that I had no idea, because I just argued with him.

But, interestingly enough, he told me about a script called Pursuit.  The first draft was written by a writer whose work I respect, Leigh Brackett.  Now, it became Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, but [at least five years earlier] Hawks told me about this project.  He owned it, apparently, for a while.

So, dissolve, and I drop out and I’m in Hawaii for a year, and then I come back.  I was doing the same thing I was in Hawaii.  I was just hanging out here.  Latent hippie phase or whatever, until the money ran out.  Then I decided: Well, hey, I’m going to go for the brass ring and I’m only going to write features.  I did one test script that didn’t sell, but it fell into the hands of Norman Herman, who produced Dirty Mary, and he hired me to rewrite Leigh Brackett, who I knew about from Hawks on [Pursuit].  But when it came time for the credits, there is a name – I don’t know who this person is.  I expected to share credit with Leigh Brackett.  Fine; I respect her work.  [But] this crops up, “Written by Antonio Santean and Leigh Chapman,” completely bypassing Leigh Brackett, forgetting that Howard Hawks owned it.   I have no earthly idea who that person is.  But apparently that book had a long history of ownership, so all of a sudden I had to share [credit, i.e. with someone who had written an earlier, discarded draft].

And what’s the story on Truck Turner, which is probably your other best-remembered film today?

I wrote a script about a caucasian bounty hunter. (The research was an interesting story).  Freddie Weintraub owned it [and] I think he partnered with Larry Gordon.  I remember going into the office and, with my usual insouciance? arrogance? announced that, in that case, I wasn’t going to do any freebie re-writes. The response? That’s OK. He doesn’t want you on the project anyway.  Pretty funny.  And then, it became a blaxloitation film … about pimps and whores, right? I don’t think any of that was in my script and I’m not sure why I even received a story credit. I used Jerry Wilkes [as a pseudonym].  That’s part of my ex-husband’s name, but not the entire name.  I was invited to the screening and recall telling Freddie that there was so little left of what I wrote that they could still do my script and no one would recognize it.

Why did you end up specializing in action-adventure? Was it something you were drawn to, or did you just get typed with those kinds of projects?

That’s just my temperament.  I couldn’t write a romantic comedy or a chick flick or a love story if my life [depended on it].  I mean, I could write a love story, but it would have to be like a Casablanca type of love story, and some people would have to die.  I mean, I daresay, if I analyze this – and I have – growing up the way I did, that my alter ego is male.  Because I decided very early on that guys got to have all the fun.  I mean, women, what did they do?  They fall in love, they get married, they have kids.  There are exceptional women in this world, yes there are.  But when I was growing up, they were just totally boring.

All right, here’s an example.  I was working for Bob Cort.  He was at Twentieth Century-Fox, and he wanted to do the first X-rated film that a major studio had ever produced.  I remember, I’m with his assistant, David Fields and we’re sitting in this screening room, and we’re watching these porn flicks.  It was, you know, Behind the Green Door and Debbie Does Dallas, and they’re frigging dying, and I’m laughing because it reminds me of a visit to a gynecologist’s office, you know what I mean?  We’re doing our research.  Anyway, I decided, the only way this is going to fly is if you do it as a soap opera.  I thought, okay, let’s take Princess Caroline of Monaco and that first husband of hers.  Let’s make it larger than life, and then insert all the sex stuff and maybe it’ll work that way.  So I’m writing this.  Here I have this heroine whose goal is to marry this dude, and I actually called up one of my sisters, who’s married, and I said, “Morgan, what does it mean to love somebody?” 

Being in love – I’m very good at being in love, but that’s passionate and short-lived and [a] fantasy.  What does it mean to love somebody?  Why is that important?  I can’t write this script if I don’t figure out why that’s [important].  She said, “Well, it means that you want to be most important person in the world to another person.”  And I thought, “Oh.  Thank you!”   It gave me a bead on it, because that’s not how I view things.  I was never interested in that.  I wouldn’t want that responsibility.  No, I don’t want that kind of closeness.  But I think that her answer was quite a good answer, and probably why most people know how to get married and stay in relationships, and that that is the driving force in their lives, that they want that.  I don’t want that.  So, I told you that story to tell you how incapable I am of understanding [female melodrama].  I’m just incapable of understanding why anybody would write those movies or go to them.  I can’t do it.  Look, I would rather be waterboarded than locked into a room to watch The Sound of Music.  I like larger-than-life characters who do dangerous, heroic things.  And that, to me, means men.

I guess I’m not surprised that you never remarried.

No, not tempted ever again.  Because I understood myself by then.  I understood that my thing is to be in love with love.  That’s very different from loving someone and wanting a lasting relationship.  Besides, particularly when I’m writing, which has been most of my life, I’m completely emotionally inaccessible.  You’d have to be insane to want to be married to me.  I’m just not there.  And there’s just a critical difference between love and loving somebody.  I don’t want somebody saying, “Where have you been?  I was worried about you.  What do you want for dinner?  I don’t know, what do you want to have, Marty?  Did you call the plumber?”  You know, I know how to take care of myself.  I’m a loner by nature.  I don’t want somebody underfoot.  Men – you’re going to hate this – men belong in the bedroom.

And yet I found articles from the seventies in which you expressed some scorn for the feminist movement.

I lived the life of a feminist, but I am not in favor of what feminists want to do.  I think that feminists want to emasculate men.  I don’t want to emasculate them.  When I say something like they belong in the bedroom, I just mean, hey, I’m out for the fun, romantic, passionate part of things.  But I don’t want somebody – I mean, nobody’s ever paid my bills.  I took care of myself.  Women who are trophy wives – shit, that’s just socially acceptable prostitution.  

But I want men to be men, and do manly things.  I mean, I see these men getting turned into not exactly house-husbands, but, “Did you take out the trash?”  I would never do that to a guy.  You lead your life and I will lead mine, and let’s get together, preferably on some romantic excursion or in the bedroom or whatever, and totally get into each other.  But knowing that it’s going to stop and that you are going to conduct your life on your own, and I’m going to conduct my life on my own.  

Though she had a relationship with her Man From U.N.C.L.E. co-star Robert Vaughn, and several other powerful Hollywood figures, Chapman insisted on charting her career without their help.

So you turned down television offers after you returned from Hawaii?  That’s why there are no more episodic credits at that point?

Yeah, for the most part.  There were a few lapses.  A mini-series that I did – actually, two of them.  For different reasons, neither one got made.  I’m truly glad one of them didn’t get made, because it was off of a novel that I wrote, Southern Exposure, and it was personal.

A published novel?

Yeah.  Well, no, it was supposed to be published.  Random House bought it.  Basically, it was The Fountainhead with solar energy.  Then the editor who bought it either left or got fired.  I said, “Well, now I’ve learned enough to know what happens.  It’ll just be another book that . . . won’t get promoted.  It’s just a matter of filling up rack space.  And I don’t want that to happen, and I want my book back.”  So I’m getting these calls from, who was the head of Random House?  His last name was Jaffe.  From Europe, saying, “Why do you want to take this book back?”  And I’m thinking, “Because I know that you haven’t read it and the only reason you’re calling me is you can’t believe some frigging first-time author wants to take her book back.  The effrontery of this intrigues you, so you’re asking me to please not take it back.”  But I did, and I still had the television rights.  

So there was a conference over at CBS, and I did not realize, at that point, even though I had done a lot of scripts, that people would buy a novel without having read the novel.  So then I do the bible, and maybe even go beyond that.  I think I went beyond that into – it was to be a four-hour miniseries, and I did the first two hours.  I warned them at the beginning.  It was a female lead.  I said, “Look, this character is my best version of myself, so for once, I warn you, I’m going to be a bit touchy about this.”  

So they start screwing around, and I remember standing up and saying, “Look, guys, if you want to do it this way, I’ve already told you that for once, I have an emotional interest in this.  If you want to do it that way, fine, but I don’t want to do it.  Just keep the rest of the money and hire somebody else.”  And I’m watching faces drop, like, “Huh?”  Then all of a sudden it’s, “No, no, no, we didn’t mean that.”  So then I believed them, but I shouldn’t have.  It was like Chinese water torture.  

Oh, and after I stood up and said that in that story conference, you know what Renee Valente did?  Renee Valente was the producer.  Boy, what a hypocrite she is.  She called me up and she said, “Leigh, were you out of your mind?  Don’t you understand a woman can’t do that?”  The big fucking feminist, and she tells me a woman can’t do that.

Stephen Verona’s Boardwalk is another ’70s cult film you wrote, which recently got a home video release.

My recollection of the film is that it’s amateurish? boring? Strasberg [was] a dreadful actor… I give V[erona] credit for tenacity.  I cannot, for the life of me, recall the name of the British investor who put up the money for the film. He was one of those “commoner” Brits who created a travel agency and made a lot of money. I don’t know how Verona met him or conned him into putting up the money … this despite having spent a day [at] his home in Penn, Buckinghamshire and having been sent on a research trip to a bunch of ski resorts because he wanted me to come up with a James Bond type action script.

That never happened because I lost touch with him because I split with V[erona].  (I lived with him for over a year.)  Also, I was insanely busy, finishing an edit of [the] novel I sold to Random House, [and] on [the] day it went into the mail, a “help” call [came] from producers on a film in Kentucky (I think it’s now called Look Down and Die [also known as Steel, 1979]).  I got on a plane for Kentucky that same afternoon, then, another 911 call [came] from NY from George [Willoughby] (lovely man, line producer) to get to NY to “rescue”/rewrite part of Boardwalk because V[erona] was screwing up … got on a plane for NY the day I was scheduled to leave Kentucky.

Did you work much as a script doctor?

No, not really.  I mean, I would have considered myself a script doctor on a lot of The Wild Wild West.  There was one [film] – Robert Aldrich was the director.  I knew going in that I was script doctoring and I wasn’t going to get any credit, on something called All the Marbles…

That was Aldrich’s last movie, the one about the lady wrestlers.

Yeah, his last movie.  It was just making the dialogue better.  I spent a week doing it.  I got along well with Aldrich.  See, I got along well with all these people [about whom] everybody else said, “Oh, they’re a nightmare.”

Albert S. Ruddy, the producer of The Godfather, is someone you worked for several times.

The second time I worked for Ruddy was Impulse, which was Sondra Locke directed.  The third time I worked for Ruddy was Walker, Texas Ranger.  If you look up who wrote the pilot for Walker, Texas Ranger, you’ll find the name Louise McCarn.  That is my mother’s name.  That was Al Ruddy and Leslie Greif.  I love working for Ruddy.  Ruddy makes me laugh.  That was the second or third time I worked for Ruddy.  But then they asked me if I wanted to be a showrunner and stuff.  I don’t.  I don’t want to move to Dallas and be a showrunner.  I turned down, oh, all those jobs that would give me a lot more money than what I have.  But I can’t do it.  I can’t do the same thing everyday.

Oh, by the way, I think Paul Haggis did the original one-hour script that I read.  I technically was doing a rewrite, because it was a one-hour pilot that they’d been trying to get off the ground.  For some reason, CBS said that they wanted it to be two hours and they wanted change the story.  

So anyway, I did the pilot, and I promised Ruddy and Greif that I would do three episodes.  [But] I did not like the showrunner.  He and I were not at all on the same page.  So I did one episode and then I said, “I’m out of here.”  Because Ruddy and Leslie were dismissed.  I don’t know the details of how that happened, or how it worked out for them.  But they were why I would have been willing to do even three episodes.  Because the story conferences were fun; I liked them.  I thought that it became very saccharine.  It wasn’t what Ruddy, Greif, and I had written.  And I just thought, I don’t want a career in television, so this isn’t going to do my name any good.  I don’t like what happened to the pilot, so why put my name on it?  

The last thing that I did was with Sherry Lansing.  This one really pissed me off.  I was adapting a book.  I thought it was a very well-written book.  The author [Erika Holzer], her husband was the attorney for Ayn Rand, so that Randian philosophy which I grew up with was in there.  Michael Levy was the producer, and I refused to talk to his partner, [Michael] Gruskoff.  Gruskoff was a rude asshole, so I just said, “Not if Gruskoff’s [there].”  I don’t remember how many people were in the office with Sherry, and Sherry wanted to turn this book – which I thought [had] enormous potential; it raised important questions – She wanted to turn it into The Star Chamber.  Without thinking, I did exactly what I did when Renee Valente said, “Oh, women can’t do that.”  I stood up and did ten minutes on, “Sherry, if you do Star Chamber, it’s not going to make a dime, because you’re going to turn [the protagonist] into like a female Charlie Bronson.”  Well, once again, the jaws dropped.  Anyway, I did my first draft, and I modeled the pace of it after the good John Grisham thing, The Firm, and called it Victims Anonymous.  I sort of saw it coming, but that was the first time that basically I was fired.  It turned into something starring Sally Field.  The only thing that was left [from] that book was a woman on the freeway in traffic overhearing her daughter get raped and murdered.

Oh, was that John Schlesinger’s An Eye for an Eye?

Yes.  I had the satisfaction of having read a review that said, “Sally Field is acting like Charlie Bronson, and it doesn’t fly.”  I remember laughing and saying, “Up yours, Sherry.”  [Chapman’s draft was written in 1993; the film came out in 1996.]

Are you retired now?

I don’t want to use that word.  Such an awful word.  One day I woke up and just said, “If I write another script, I’ll puke.”  That was eight, nine years ago.  And then I decided to momentum trade.  Trading, stock market trading.  I was part of that wonderful internet bubble.  Give me a new thing to do, and I’m [fascinated].  So that was cool, until the bubble burst.  Now it’s underwater photography.  I just started taking photographs four years ago [with] a point-and-shoot camera.  Now I’ve got a twenty-pound rig.  It’s glorious down there.  It’s a different kind of a rush than skiing.  I hate everything about skiing except those first few moments when you’re going [downhill].  I hate the cold, I hate the dry air.  So that’s a true adrenaline rush.  This is a whole different kind of – it’s an adrenaline rush, and then it’s the most serene I will ever get.  Which is not very.  It’s gorgeous.  You’re weightless, you’re actually weightless.  You’re not completely weightless even on the moon, but you are underwater.  I love it.

“Lotsa teeth” was how Leigh captioned this photo (from circa 2010) when she emailed it to me.

SIDEBAR: THIRTEEN UNPRODUCED SCREENPLAYS BY LEIGH CHAPMAN

20,000 Bikinis Under the Sea; That Loving Feeling; and It’s a Tuf Life (all 1965).  On the heels of her first produced screenplay, the youth movie That Swingin’ Summer (1965), Chapman was signed to pen three features for writer-producer Norman Maurer’s unit at Columbia.  That Loving Feeling (which, like It’s a Tuf Life, was a co-production with Dick Clark’s company) would have been a vehicle for The Righteous Brothers, who had appeared in A Swingin’ Summer.  The abrupt collapse of the beach party fad spiked all of these projects, probably before any of the scripts were completed and likely to Chapman’s relief.

Kings X (1967).  This was Chapman’s first assignment for producer Albert S. Ruddy, then best known as the co-creator of Hogan’s Heroes.  Chapman: “‘X’ as in chess and pawn.  There was the Howard Hawks thing, and then I did a movie for Ruddy.  He was over at CBS, and Clint Eastwood was in and out of the office, and Eastwood was supposed to do Kings X.”  According to Variety, the film was to have been produced by CBS Films in 1968, with Brian G. Hutton directing, Eastwood and Claudia Cardinale starring, and 77 Sunset Strip star Roger Smith credited with the screenplay, under the pseudonym “John Jordan.”  Hutton and Eastwood ended up making Where Eagles Dare (1969) together instead.

Occam’s Razor (1969).  A “youth-oriented picture with a heavy musical emphasis,” announced in December 1969 with a start date the following March.  The film was to be the initial outing of Chapman and music producer Harley Hatcher’s independent company Har-Leigh Enterprises.  Chapman wrote the screenplay, while Hatcher would have produced and scored the film.  Chapman never mentioned him by name, and he didn’t respond to an e-mail inquiry last year, but I have a hunch that Hatcher may have been the “obsessive love affair” she described in the interview.

Blackfather (1974).  Written for producer Norman T. Herman prior to Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, this was a “black version of The Godfather,” according to Tadhg Taylor’s Masters of the Shoot ’Em-Up (McFarland, 2015).  Taylor’s interview with Chapman, conducted after this one, has some good stories that she didn’t tell me.

Detroit Boogie (1974) and The Tin Walls (1975).  The first was a spec script that Chapman sold to Dino De Laurentiis, the second a prison picture, based on a letter written by a minimum security inmate to director Robert Ellis Miller (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter), who would have produced the film.

The Laconia Incident (1977).  An epic-scaled dramatization of a convoluted true story that was hushed up in 1942 because it managed to embarrass both Axis and Allied powers: an American bomber strafed survivors (mainly Italian POWs) from a British ship as they were being rescued by the U-boat that had just torpedoed them.  Chapman: “I was hired to write a World War II script called The Laconia Incident for Ruddy’s then-roommate, the director Brian Hutton, to be produced by Patrick Wachsberger, specifically because Hutton wanted Hawks’s style [of] male-female repartee. It was heavily advertised at Cannes but W[achsberger] never came up with enough money to get it made.”  Chapman revised a script by Robert and Laurie Dillon (The French Connection II) for an independent company run by Wachsberger and his father, Nat Wachsberger (the producer of Jerry Lewis’s legendary, unreleased The Day the Clown Cried).  The Laconia Incident was to have been shot in Malta and came close enough to happening that the Wachsbergers sprang for full-page ads in the trade papers.  Unfortunately for Chapman, the film immediately ahead of hers on their slate was the underfinanced megaturkey Starcrash.

Felonious Laughter (1978).  An original teleplay by Chapman, described by producer Maurice Singer as the story of a middle-class woman in prison, to have been done as a made-for-TV movie for NBC.  (Singer’s company also produced Boardwalk, then titled Brighton Beach.)  Other Chapman-scripted telefilms that were announced but never made included an untitled 1982 Pam Dawber vehicle and Southern Exposure (1983), described above.

Motordrome Project (circa 1980).  Chapman’s week on All the Marbles… was a byproduct of an unproduced script about motordrome racing that she wrote, against her better judgment, with a collaborator who was more familiar with the sport than she was.  Chapman’s agent sent the script to Robert Aldrich, who met with her and wanted to make the film.  But, without her knowledge, Chapman’s collaborator had sent the script simultaneously to Steve McQueen – a serious breach of Hollywood etiquette.  After McQueen died of cancer, Chapman smoothed things over with Aldrich, who set the film up at Universal.  It fell apart again because Chapman’s collaborator wouldn’t sell the script unless he could also produce the film, but Aldrich insisted on hiring his son, William Aldrich (who had produced All the Marbles…), instead.

Rhinestone Heights (circa 1980).  The original writer on this story of seedy 42nd Street life was the cult actress Helena Kallianiotes (Chapman: “…best known for her performance in Five Easy Pieces … particularly hysterical if you know Helena, which I did”).  This was the first project to which Jon Voight and Andrei Konchalovsky (who later collaborated on 1985’s Runaway Train) were attached after Voight sponsored the Russian director’s emigration to the United States in 1979.   Chapman: “I was hired by [Voight] to re-write a script and spent four hours a day, seven days a week (I think) for three months in a home he’d rented in Coldwater Canyon.  It was grueling because I went there every day, knowing he was going to try to make me wrong about totally insignificant things.  There were times when I’d arrive and he say the kids (Angelina and Jamie) were there and he had to put them to bed.  Curiously, he never introduced me to them.  And he never came onto me … just played mind-fuck games. My ‘victory’ was not letting him get to me …. Voight was supposedly going to direct the script in order to put his then gf [girlfriend] in one of the title roles. Based on my experience with him … the indecisiveness … don’t think it would’ve worked out … and perhaps was no more than something to hang onto the gf.”  The girlfriend was probably Stacey Pickren, an aspiring actress Voight dated in the late seventies and early eighties.

Jean-Claude Van Damme Project (circa 1992).  Chapman: “I was supposed to do Double Impact for Jean-Claude Van Damme.  There were about ten people involved in that.  Jean-Claude and I got along fine, but there was a guy named Peter McAlevey, who somehow was involved with Michael Douglas [their company produced Double Impact], and I could tell that McAlevey just didn’t want me on that project.  So, as the deal memo was coming through for close to mid-six figures, I call up David Wirtshafter, who was then my agent, and said, ‘David, I don’t want to do it.’  And of course he was not pleased.  But then Jean-Claude had an idea; he wanted to do Papillon.  So I came up with Papillon, on an island, but what happens is gladiatorial combat.  I was hired by Columbia – he had a deal with Columbia – but it never got made, because that was the period when Jean-Claude like, lost it with Wife #3 or whatever.  They apparently couldn’t get him to commit to the picture, couldn’t control him.”

Leigh

The cigarettes were what killed her.  I don’t know that for certain, you never do, but Leigh died of cancer and she sure loved to smoke.  Never apologized for it.  Chose a restaurant with outdoor seating for our one afternoon together, and then another when that one was too crowded, so that she could smoke during the interview.  I wonder if she was defiant until the end about the pleasure she took in smoking, or if she felt foolish about having traded some years for it.  Probably the former.  I wish I could have asked her.

Leigh Chapman, who died a year ago today, was an actress and a screenwriter, associated in the latter capacity with the kind of drive-in films of the seventies that enjoy a cult following now.  Early on, she wrote episodes of The Wild Wild West, then segued to the big screen with energetically schlocky action and exploitation movies: Truck Turner, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, The Octagon.  When I published a short profile on Leigh in 2010, it resonated with contemporary readers.  In her attitude as much as her work, Leigh embodied a kind of kickass feminism that’s popular in the cinema today.  It’s a shame that she wasn’t active during a time when she could’ve written movies for Ronda Rousey or Zoe Bell.

The full interview I did with Leigh in 2009 has gone unpublished for so long that it’s gotten embarrassing.  Just as Leigh was an odd match to the older white guys who were writing for the same shows that she was, our exchanges were hard to fit into the template of the detailed oral histories that I was compiling at the time.  Leigh could tell a great anecdote, but she had a mind like a pinball machine.  It was pointless to confront her with chronology or discrepancies.  I’d ask what television shows she watched before she became a professional; she would mention watching Route 66 in college; I would point out that Route 66 debuted in 1960, after she graduated; Leigh would insist that she never watched television after she moved to Los Angeles; and however much we might go back and forth, we’d never sort out how and when she saw Route 66, just that somehow she had been obsessed with Tod and Buz’s Corvette.  And the whole interview was like that, one rabbit hole after another.

After our first and only meeting in person, Leigh declared that I would be the archive to which she would donate her files.  I tried to refuse, but she insisted with her usual obstinacy.  I was a little relieved when the envelope arrived and her personal papers consisted – predictably – of exactly three headshots and a handful of clippings.  The real value was in the witty annotations she affixed to each by post-it note, some of which I’ve reproduced here.  Leigh had a great sense of humor, a very youthful one.  Actually, Leigh was youthful in many ways; she was a gym rat and an iPhone junkie and she dressed like someone a third her age.  We were chatting on the day when David Carradine died under rather gruesome circumstances, and I ended up explaining to her what a “gasper” was.  Leigh adored her new bit of slang, and I could tell she couldn’t wait to try it out on someone else.  She would have loved the gaffe that remained in the headline of her Hollywood Reporter obituary for a day or so, rendering her most successful screen credit as Dirty Harry, Crazy Larry, and she would have howled at the round of Twitter wisecracks that ensued after film critic Matt Zoller Seitz mocked the paper’s shoddy proofreading.  Had the same error turned up in an obit for someone else from Dirty Mary, sending the link to Leigh is the first thing I would have thought to do.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E., on which Leigh had a recurring role, remains a major fetish object among TV fans.  Leigh drove U.N.C.L.E. historians crazy by turning down every interview request; I think she did give one other substantive interview after I met her, to someone who was doing a book on ’70s action films, but she continued to evade interviews and convention invites even after I became the one relaying them to her.  (Leigh did have a specific reason for not wanting to talk about The Man From U.N.C.L.E., although it’s hard to explain.)  I’m not sure why she said yes to me and no to others.  She was kind enough to say she liked my initial letter, but probably it was just because I approached her as a writer, which is how Leigh thought of herself, rather than as an actress.

It’s tempting for someone who does what I do to describe sources as friends.  But for the most part people tell you their story and then you go your separate ways; it’s a memorable encounter, a lovely one in some cases, but it stretches the notion of friendship.  Leigh was a rare exception; I think she and I were friends, or at least phone-and-email friends, if that’s a different thing; it probably is.  We bonded over similar views, which were not shared by many, about long-term relationships (against them) and children (also against them).  She was sort of a half-baked Ayn Randian, which I couldn’t cosign, but I understood exactly how Rand’s headstrong individualist heroes inspired Leigh (and I went along with her to this extent, actually: that every creative person should have a streak of Howard Roark in her).  Like me, Leigh was a loner and a night owl – from the outset, I was under strict instructions never to call before mid-afternoon.  She lived by herself in a Sunset Strip high-rise and although she wasn’t a recluse, she felt no great need to emerge in search of human companionship.  She was fond of her three siblings and their families, but that seemed to be it; there was no one the movie biz with whom she still hung out.  Only after she died did I realize that, during her last three years – once a sinus problem forced her, cruelly, to give up her passion for underwater photography in favor of still lifes and city scenes – Leigh had joined a photography group and become close to some of its members; it was from one of those friends that I learned the details of her death.

It it possible to crave solitude and still be lonely: this was the specific contradiction in Leigh’s nature that made me see her as a kindred spirit.  Leigh’s desire for privacy was always a little ambivalent.  After my profile of her was published, Leigh enjoyed the attention and didn’t pretend otherwise, but also joked that I was turning her into “a fame whore.”  Some time after that, her address was published on an internet forum for celebrity autograph hunters and she got a flurry of mail asking for signatures.  Leigh asked me what the hell was going on and when I explained (including the fact that many of the inquiries were probably from dealers), she asked me to send back her old pictures so she could have them duplicated and honor the autograph requests.  Then she changed her mind a few hours later: “Don’t bother returning the foto.  Now that I know what the game is … I don’t wanna play.”  I could always count on a long and friendly response from Leigh to the most trivial email; I owed her a reply when she died.  Once she trusted me, she was totally open, and one problem with editing our interview has been sifting out the lengthy follow-up material from our banter about everyday life and, especially, contemporary television, which Leigh kept up with and had strong opinions about.

(Here are some samples of Leigh Chapman’s TV criticism on the fly.  House of Cards: “an artful depiction of why one will never find a single Diogenes among the current administration and ruling class.”  True Detective: “… dark, very dark … very Neitzche/existentialist … which happens to be my bottom-line world view.”  The Newsroom: “The idea that a middle-aged man is still hung up on a pseudo-Wikipedia twit is appalling.”  Girls (and yes, I think this is a jab at Lena Dunham’s nude scenes; Leigh was a feminist on her own terms): “I’ve only watched 5 minutes of the show but that was enough to give me hallucinations of Ahab’s great white whale.”  Her favorites were the testosterone-saturated Entourage and the pulpy True Blood, which were classic Leigh, although she also admitted to having liked Sex and the City, which certainly wasn’t.)

I felt let down that I didn’t get to say goodbye, a little betrayed that Leigh didn’t tell me she was dying.  But of course she was the type to keep it to herself, as I may be in my time, because all the glum and awkward conversations are especially unendurable for people as independent as she was and I am.  Leigh was diagnosed in February 2014 with lung cancer that had already spread to several other organs, and by April the prognosis was grim.  There was surgery and chemo but it was too late, and she stopped treatment in September.  Naturally I went back and checked: we last exchanged emails on May 30 (she had Googled the new neighborhood into which I had moved and offered her approval).  Although our interview was long since “finished,” any time something came up regarding her career, I sent it her way in the hope of eliciting tales I hadn’t heard before.  The elusive Antonio Santean, a credited collaborator on Dirty Mary Crazy Larry whom Leigh had never met or heard of during production, died in March, and his death notice shed a little bit of light on a mystery that had always bugged her.  (“Something’s still weird here,” she wrote back.  And then she parsed some of the minutiae of WGA politics and never addressed the fact that I was sending obituaries to someone who’d just been given her own death sentence.)

Then I mentioned that Leigh’s film Boardwalk, directed by her then-companion Stephen Verona (The Lords of Flatbush), had just come out on Blu-ray.  Leigh already knew that, because she’d been invited to a private screening to commemorate the re-release – a screening with an admission charge, never mind that she’d written the movie.

“Sent him the $12 via Paypal and stayed home,” she reported, as if I hadn’t already guessed.

My full interview with Leigh Chapman is here.

“No memory of when, where, or why the ‘bunny’ shot was taken.”

“Correction: Me? ‘Crying’ in an office? No f—ing way!”

“Me? A shill for this ugly lamp? I guess I must’ve but I certainly don’t recall it.”

Obituary: Jerry McNeely (1928-2014)

Jerry McNeely, one of the most erudite and underappreciated of the early episodic television writers, died on July 14 at age 86.

Born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, on June 20, 1928, McNeely entered the medium at the very tail end of the live anthology era, and came into his own in the liberal dramas of the Camelot years.  By default a medical specialist – his first significant patron, Norman Felton, executive produced Dr. Kildare, and Kildare’s producer, David Victor, brought McNeely with him to his own hit, Marcus Welby, M.D. – McNeely took full advantage of that genre’s narrative dependency on sickness to survey all manner of spiritual and philosophical, as well as physical, maladies.

“The Mask Makers,” his first great Kildare script, grew out of scrupulous research on plastic story, but it’s most interested in charting the psychological aftereffects of a nose job on the insecure young woman (Carolyn Jones) who has it.  “The Balance and the Crucible” skirts the cliches of a story about a minister-cum-doctor (he’s preparing for a career as a missionary), played by Peter Falk, who loses his faith after his wife’s death.  At the beginning, Doctors Kildare and Gillespie are both impatient with Falk’s character, because they think he’s too good a doctor not to pursue medicine exclusively.  He’s rightly offended at their implicit insistence that his faith has less value than science.  But McNeely, a rationalist through-and-through, refuses to send this doctor off to the jungle; he doesn’t condemn religion outright but won’t sentimentalize it, either.  Though Falk gets a long-deferred breakdown scene in the end, McNeely’s climax comes in the preceding scene, in which Kildare uses a bit of rhetorical gimmickry to convince his friend that if he still experiences doubt, as he has conceded, then he must also still have faith.

That’s quintessential McNeely: articulate forays into pedagogy and debate packaged as character-driven melodrama, in the same manner as Reginald Rose or David Simon.  “Who Ever Heard of a Two-Headed Doll?” considers the thorny question of how to deliver grim news to a patient, especially one who seems utterly incapable of handling it.  A “B” story, in which Dr. Kildare transitions from intern to resident (this was the third season premiere), illustrates McNeely’s grace in finding notes of wisdom and honesty in the perfunctory.  Senior doctors barely acknowledge the staff promotions in a meeting.  The residents must now supply their own batteries for their medical gizmos.  Dr. Kildare’s brief respite from his patients is interrupted by a dorky intern, there to kick him out of the dorm room that’s no longer his.  “That day you’ve looked forward to for so long, and it comes and it’s just another day,” Kildare muses ruefully.  Ain’t that the truth.

Though modern medicine has, hopefully, left behind McNeely’s solution in “Doll” (blissful ignorance, with some caveats), his obesity episode could be remade on a modern doctor drama with few changes.  In “Charlie Wade Makes Lots of Shade,” Charlie (Dale Malone, in accomplished performance) begins to suffer serious health consequences as a consequence of lifelong overeating.  Kildare and Gillespie try to prod him into losing weight without crossing over into being unhelpful jerks.  A nurse (Marion Ross) is less sympathetic: she spends every day feeling hungry in order to maintain her figure, so why should she sympathize with this glutton?  The ending feels uneasy.  Charlie vows to improve his eating habits, but we’ll believe it when we see it (which we don’t); McNeely has laced the script with reminders that Charlie’s struggle will never get any easier.  (Malone, a prolific musical theater actor with only a handful of film credits, died young.)

Marcus Welby was more watered-down than its predecessor, although McNeely was able to do good work there, too; Victor chose his script on venereal disease, “A Very Special Sailfish,” to open the second season.  McNeely and Victor collaborated on Owen Marshall, Counselor-at-Law, and then McNeely created a pair of short-lived dramas, Lucas Tanner (a teacher show) and Three For the Road (a family drama).  Later he was a producer and writer for Trauma Center and Our House, as well as some acclaimed telefilms, including Something For Joey, for which McNeely received an Emmy nomination.

(In the meantime, McNeely took relatively impersonal detours through other A-list series, including The Twilight Zone, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Virginian, and McMillan.)

The remarkable aspect of McNeely’s writing, one so unusual that it became the hook for a 1966 TV Guide profile, was that almost two decades of it was done half a continent away from Hollywood, in Madison, Wisconsin.  Secure in the patronage of Felton and a few others, McNeely was able to write in his spare time, commute to Los Angeles for story meetings while at the same time juggling a full course load in the University of Wisconsin’s Communications Department.  McNeely believed that his unlikely success at such a remove was due to his ability to “write shootable first drafts,” a rare skill likely to motivate producers not only to keep a writer employed, but to keep him a secret as well.

Only when he retired from academia, in his mid-forties, did McNeely relocate to Los Angeles and expand his ambitions to including producing and directing; indeed, he even made acting cameos in several of his telefilms.  (McNeely the polymath was also a songwriter, penning lyrics for songs in Dr. Kildare and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. – as well as collaborating with Jerry Bock on “Song of the Valley,” a theme for his 1961 Hallmark Hall of Fame.)

I met Jerry in 2004, when he was already suffering from Parkinson’s Disease and lived part-time in the Motion Picture & Television Country House.  Because of his illness, I was only able to interview McNeely in detail about the first half of his career.  That interview is presented below, as an “outtake” from the larger oral history project that will hopefully see the light in book form soon.

How did you get started writing in television?

The old story of seeing it done and thinking I could do as well or better than that.  I had just finished my dissertation for my doctorate in Communication Arts, and I had accepted an appointment at the University of Wisconsin for fall.  So I had the summer essentially free, and I thought I’d write something.  I had an idea for a TV play, and I sat down and I wrote it in three days.

Then you had to sell it.

It’s a long story, but it’s quite a story.  I looked in writers’ magazines to find the names of New York agents, and I picked one who had attracted some attention by representing Ira Levin and Stephen Sondheim.  So I boldly wrote to her and said, “I’ve written this TV script, and could you read it?”  Weeks went by, and finally I got a letter back from her that said, “Yes, I’ll read it.  Send it to me but then be patient, because it’s going to take a while.”

So months passed, and I hadn’t heard from her.  Flora Roberts was her name.  [Finally] I got a call from her, and she said that she liked the script a lot and was submitting it to Matinee Theatre, which was a live hour-long show done in the middle of the afternoon by NBC, primarily to sell color TV sets.  They’d had trouble marketing them because they couldn’t demonstrate [the appeal of color].

She submitted it to Matinee Theatre, and they passed.  And she submitted it to every other show in town.  Her first choice was Studio One, just for the prestige of it, and everybody passed.  Then, when she heard that Norman Felton was taking over Studio One for the summer, she went back and showed it to him, and he liked it and bought it.  People used to ask me: How do you break into TV?  I’d say, “It’s very simple.  You get a real good agent and, against one in fifty thousand odds, you write an original script and they buy it.”

I found later that there were some other things that happened behind the scenes that I didn’t know about.  When my script got to Flora’s office, even thought she had given me permission to send it and said she would read it, it got tossed on a stack of hundreds of unsoliticed manuscripts that she was getting every day.  That wasn’t where it was supposed to be, but that’s where it was.  One day her secretary, during her lunch hour, having her lunch, idly was looking for something to read.  She reached down to this stack and took mine and opened it, flipped through it, and saw a page that attracted her attention.  Laid it aside, a couple of days later got back to it, read it, liked it, took it into Flora and said, “I think you may want to read this.”  That just wasn’t part of her job – that was the only time this ever happened.

I hoped and felt that once I had broken through and gotten a network credit, that it would become easier.  And I guess it was easier, bottom line, because I sold some other stuff.  I wrote another script and she sent it to Ralph Nelson, and he bought it.  Ralph Nelson was producing a series called Climax.  Ralph was a top-notch TV director and had become [the] producer.

But, right at that time, the industry shifted gears and shifted to the west coast.  Rather than a [live] television industry, it became a film industry.  What I got out of the second show, Climax, was a number of inquiries from producers, all essentially saying, “When you move to the West Coast, please come in and see me.”  There was no hint that anybody would be interested in hiring me as long as I was not living on one coast or another.

Had you gone to New York for Studio One?  What was that experience like?

Yes.  The experience was mindblowing.  My jaw was hanging open most of the time.  Because, in the first place, it was the first play I had written that had been produced, let alone by front-rank professionals, with professional actors.  I think Studio One paid one round-trip airfare, and I went twice.  I went for some rehearsals, and came back for the final rehearsals and air.  So I paid my own way once, as I recall.

I assumed, now that I had broken through with two scripts, that I could function [by] marketing my stuff from Wisconsin, but it just wasn’t to be.  It was as if O’Hare International didn’t exist.  Only if you lived on one coast or the other.

Another wildly improbable coincidence finally got me going for good, and that was: The Hallmark company sponsored a worldwide competition for original teleplay writing.   The International Teleplay Competition, they called it.  They had some celebrity judges – Maurice Evans, and I can’t recall who else.  As I recall, first prize was $8,000 or maybe $10,000.  It was substantial, for that day and age at least.  So I wrote a ninety-minute script, and handed it into the competition.  They had hundreds, I heard later.  Hundreds and hundreds of scripts.

A few months later I got a call from a woman who was a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, and knew of me.  We had mutual friends.  She, on a personal level, called me before the announcement had been made, and just said quietly that, hey, hang on a minute, I think you might hear some good news here.  And I thought, “My god, I’ve won the contest!”

Well, I didn’t win the contest.  I won second place.  George Schaefer, who produced the Hallmark Hall of Fame series, just on his own – he had nothing to do with [judging] the competition – but out of his own curiosity and interest he asked if he could read the top ten.  He read them, and mine was one of those, and he liked it and said, “Hey, I want to do this.”  George told me he didn’t care for the first [place] winner [and] really didn’t have any interest in doing it.  He did want to do mine.  So the irony was, by the time they negotiated my contract, I got almost as much money as the first prize winner did for my fee for the script.

So the initial winner received the money, but didn’t get produced?

Yes.  So, again, from nothing.  My career was non-existent and stalled.  Then all of a sudden, the second time, lightning struck out of the blue.  I sold this script, and this time it got me rolling.  Norman Felton moved to California, and started producing Dr. Kildare.  He was willing to hire me because he had confidence in me, and knew my work.  And as long as I was working and getting assignments, then the other producers who were afraid of hiring somebody in Chicago [would follow suit].

How long did you stay in Chicago?  When did you finally move to Los Angeles?

Travel and work schedules just got to be unrealistic as I started getting more and more assignments, flying back and forth for script conferences.  I think the last year before I [moved] I had like eighteen round trips between Madison and L.A.  Finally I was going to have to decide whether I was going to be in the academic world or in the production world.

So you were still teaching the whole time?

Yeah.  An article [in] TV Guide related to my being a teacher, a stuffy dignified teacher who wrote Man From U.N.C.L.E.

That was really unusual at that point.

It was.  I won an award – I guess it was a Writers Guild Award for best script of the year.  They had a dinner in New York and a dinner in L.A., and I didn’t go.  I couldn’t afford to be flying all over to see Rod Serling receive his award.  So I didn’t go, and won it!  And heard later that the guy who was the emcee said, “And the winner – in Madison, Wisconsin?!”

What script was that for?

I think it was the first one, the Studio One script.

What was that about?

And the story and the setting and the characters were sort of really out of my background.  I’m from southeast Missouri, Cape Girardeau.  It was a folk fantasy, sort of.  Your traditional drought-ridden desert, where the farmer’s trying to raise crops, needing rain desperately.  They’re very religious.  They have a meeting at the school to pray for rain, and in the middle of their prayer, a knock on the door.  A man in a white suit (James Daly) is at the door.  He says, “I’m an angel.  The lord heard your prayer for water, and he said you good people deserve some help.  So I’m here to get you some water.”  The people are dazzled, confused.  There’s another knock on the door, and it opens, and it’s James Gregory, who’s dressed in black.  They call them Mr. Black and Mr. White.  Each claims the other is an emissary of the devil, and that he’s going to poison the water and destroy the village.  And each claims that he’s going to save the village.  The townspeople, try to figure out how they’re going to decide.  Finally somebody suggests a wrestling match.  [Mr. White and Mr. Black] say, “No, the lord wouldn’t be party to any violence.  It just isn’t done any more.”  This young agnostic farmer says, “How about a staring match?  If the lord would give him strength to wrestle the devil’s courier, he’d give him strength to out-stare him.”  So they decide that they’re going to have a staring match.  They’re going to sit down and open their eyes, and the first guy to look away is the loser.  And he’ll go on and get out and let the other one find the well.

Is there a twist at the ending?  Do you remember how it ends?

Oh, I remember how it ends.  They’ve engraved a circle in the dirt and they’ve all been warned to stay out of the circle.  The agnostic’s daughter sees that one of the men, Mr. Black, looks like he’s in trouble, his eyes are [wavering], and she in compassion decides to take him a drink of water.  And something happens – a clap of thunder and lightning.  The people say, “Mr. Black left his seat to help the little girl [and] he lost the contest.  Linus, the agnostic, says, “No.  Mr. White won the contest, but Mr. Black was the one who acted like an angel.”  That sways the people, and they stand up to Mr. White, who throws a fit, and a great temper storm rages at them.  But they all keep their courage, and Mr. White finally sheepishly grins and says, “That was rather histrionic of me, wasn’t it?”  And he goes off down the lane and the people get their water.  It’s a sweet little story.

Were you pleased with the production, and the actors who performed it?

Oh, yes, I was.

Did you watch the broadcast in the booth?

No, from the apartment of a friend, near the studio in midtown Manhattan.  The friend said, “Look, I live four or five blocks from where these things are done.”  So we went to his apartment and watched the show live there, and then hurried back to the studios to say thank you and goodbye to [the cast and crew].  It was a thrilling event in my life, it really was.  It got wonderful reaction.  Time magazine did a piece about it, and me.  John Crosby, who was the number one TV critic of the day, wrote a wonderful rave review.  If I had written it myself, I think [it could have been] more flattering.

Did you go to Los Angeles for Climax?

I went out to L.A. for a rewrite conference, a story conference.  It was the first time I’d ever been to California.

What was your Climax script, “Two Tests on Tuesday,” about?

A young man, a military veteran, is in college, married, has a child, and he cheats on a crucial exam and gets caught.  The price of his cheating is he’s going to fail the course, and there’s a chain reaction of things that will happen if he fails this course.  His life is really going to be badly [altered] because of one grade, and so he asks the professor to be kind, and to be lenient – essentially give him a passing grade.  The professor says, “I can’t do that.  I can’t just give you a grade.  You really flunked this course.”  So the young man buys a gun, and he intends to kill the professor.  But he doesn’t, and then it works out compassionately.

And the script that won the Hallmark contest, “The Joke and the Valley”?

Dean Stockwell, with a backpack, is walking through a rural area.  Rainstorm.  He goes into a barn for shelter, stumbles over a man’s body.  Owner of the barn comes through the [door], and he assumes Dean Stockwell has killed this man.  He looks down and examines the body – the owner, played by Thomas Mitchell – and he sees the guy’s face and he starts laughing.  Just breaking up.  It’s a sort of a semi-thriller about proper respect for the law, I guess you might say.  Keenan Wynn, who is Thomas Mitchell’s best buddy, Keenan and Thomas stage a fake assassination of Keenan, and they make Dean Stockwell think they’re going to kill him, hang him on the spot, and of course he’s terrified.  When he realizes they’ve been kidding him, he’s holding this knife, and he stabs Keenan and really kills him.  The townspeople are all anxious to forgive him, because it was their joking that led to it, and Thomas Mitchell says, “No, you’re not going to forgive him.  He killed him, and he’s going to be punished for it.”  It didn’t get quite the level of enthusiasm that “The Staring Match” did, but the reviews were very positive, and it brought me considerable attention.

There was a four-year gap between those last two shows.  Were you writing spec scripts during that time?

Yes.  But none of them sold.

Were you clear, at that point, that you wanted to break into television or film as a writer?

To be really honest, I wanted to be an actor first.  I would immodestly say I was a pretty good actor at the top semi-pro levels.  I did a season of summer stock.  But I was married.  We had a child.  My wife felt very threatened by the idea of my trying to be an actor.  And she should have, because it didn’t make any real sense.  So I fell into writing as an alternative, a fall-back position.  I had always like to write, and my university work certainly involved writing.  I entered some playwriting contests at the collegiate level, and won some contests.  So it wasn’t totally out of the blue that I would continue that.  It all fell into place.  I was able to be in show business without prejudicing my marriage.

Were your students aware of your second career as a television writer?  Would it be an event on campus when a show you had written aired?

Yes, it was.  The Madison papers always featured the fact that I had written this week’s such-and-such.  I was a minor-league celebrity on campus, I guess.

Were there other writers who influenced your own writing?

I’d have to say no.  There are a lot of writers that I admire, and whose work I enjoy, but in the sense of a literal influence, no, I don’t think so.  Once Rod Serling got going, I certainly looked to him as a model, both career-wise and the quality of his writing.  I can’t say I was a friend of Rod’s.  He was very gracious to me after I did a Twilight Zone and in the process met him, and he was interested in the fact that I was an academic.  I invited him to come to the campus to speak, and he said sure, he would do that.

Rod was something of a celebrity by that time.  He came to the campus and gave a lecture and was very successful.  The Union Theatre there on the campus was full, and routinely when we had guest speakers in, we’d pay them for their travel, at least.  We couldn’t pay them a fee.  I tried to do that and he wouldn’t take it.  He just did it as a courtesy to me.

Some of the thematic materials of “Joke and the Valley,” and “The Staring Match,” as a matter of fact, I would say probably relate to Serling.  Not consciously at the time – I wasn’t trying to write a Rod Serling script – [but as] I look back at it now.

How would you divide your time between your two jobs?

I always tried to keep something going, something I was working on as a writer.  One year, maybe, I would do six Dr. Kildares, and that was about as much as I had time for, to do that and teach and go back and forth for conferences, meetings.  By the time I finally decided to choose between the careers, I had done everything I wanted to do in the way of ambition in the academic world.  I got my full professorship at a very young age.  So I had done what I wanted to do there.  I hadn’t done everything I wanted to do as a writer.  Then I used the leverage as a writer to become a producer.  That was a very easy step.  The producers like David Victor that I worked for were eager to have me produce, and so it was a natural step.  Above all it avoided that awful time when I would finish a script and put it in the mail and say goodbye, and then see it on the air.  That was painful.

Why?

Well . . . they’re never going to do it the way you wanted it done.  It will be different.  It may be better, but it will be different.  If you’re producing it yourself, you just simply have more control.  You can do it the way you had envisioned it.

Do you mean in terms of casting?  Rewrites?

As a producer, you had more leverage in terms of script control.  You still had to relate to the network, that’s for sure.  Listen to their ideas and notes and sometimes accept them, and sometimes tell them to get out of the office.  But all of the decisions [were the producer’s].  The use of music always has been very important to me.  My son is a very successful motion picture composer and conductor, and I think he gravitated into that because implicitly, partly, of what I was doing and the importance of music in my work.

Can you elaborate on that?

I would aways really become deeply involved in the music process.  One example: I did a [made-for-television] picture called Something For Joey, about John Cappelletti, a football player whose brother had leukemia.  The composer I hired, just because I really admired him so much, was David Shire.  The end of that picture – I didn’t know how we were going to do it.  The end of the picture is at the Heisman Trophy dinner.  John Cappelletti gives the Heisman Trophy to his little brother, who is dying.  He has just received it, [with] all the flashbulbs and everything, and now all of a sudden he turns around and gives it to Joey.  It’s such an incredibly touching moment.  I can’t watch it today without bawling.  And David Shire proposed something very startling to me.  He said, “That’s got so incredibly much emotional power going there, if we score it like that, a big movie climax, I think it’s going to go over the top.”

So I said, “Well, what’s your solution?”

He said, “I’d like to start the cue when he finishes his speech and gives the statue to Joey.  Start the cue there with the full orchestra, and then strip it down.  As the final scene plays, take the instruments away, and at the end just a spare one-hand piano.”  It was a brilliant idea, I thought, and I had confidence that he could do it.  And he did.  But that’s an example of [how] I involved myself at that level, just because I was interested in it.  I wanted to be a part of it.

It’s interesting that you mention that, because I think that one of the few elements that date your Dr. Kildare shows is that they are somewhat overscored, and the music is very melodramatic.

Yes, I think that was partly as a result of the taste of a man named Doug Benton, who produced [Dr. Kildare].  And David Victor, who was the executive producer.  Subtlety was not too welcome around Dr. Kildare.

Did you generally have a good relationship with Dr. Kildare and its production staff?

Yes, I did.  And I enjoyed it.  I enjoyed the fact that it sort of let me use my academic connections.  I think the first one I did was on – Carolyn Jones had a nose job.  So it was very simple for me to use my connections to get to a famous plastic surgeon at Wisconsin, and he was most gracious and mentored me right through it and gave me all of the technical information I needed.

A man named Marshall Goldberg has a story credit on several of your Kildare teleplays.

Marshall was a doctor.  He contacted me.  He came to Wisconsin on a fellowship, to do a research fellowship.  He looked me up because he thought I could help him sell his writing.  And I took one of his stories and took it to the Kildare people and said, “I think I could make this into a good episode.”  They let me try it, and I did.  So we gave Marshall a story credit, and he and I had some other projects that we touched base on.

The Kildares are all very sensitive, and character-driven.

That, I would say, is deliberate.  That interests me a lot more than the nuts and bolts plot points.

So you’re thinking more in terms of character beats than story development.

Yeah.  Right.  Okay: A good rhinoplasty can turn a very homely woman into a beautiful woman.

“The Mask Makers” is very frank, emotionally.

We reconstructed Carolyn Jones’ nose from a photograph of her.  It was her real nose.

Really?  Surely they couldn’t have known that when they cast her.

No.  You know that’s going to be almost an astonishing thing to see this homely woman, and the next time you see her she’s gorgeous.  But it was true, and the psychological basis for that character – I remember Carolyn said that it was the accurate story of her life.  It’s what happened to her, when all of a sudden she began to get hit on by all of these great-looking guys, and she said, “For two days it was fun, and then I wanted to scream at all of them: Where were you the rest of my life, when I needed you?”

Do you remember where you got the idea for the story, which turned out to be accurate in her case?

No.  It was a dramatist’s invention.  I didn’t get it from her, certainly.  She [said] after she was cast, and I met her and we were talking, [that] it was autobiographical, whether anyone knew it or not.

I guess a good writer can invent something, and it turns out to be accurate!

Well, yes.  I would always test in my own mind the logic of characters’ actions.

Your Kildare scripts all strike me as being very – and unusually for television and even relative to other episodes of the series – intellectual and even philosophical in their content.

I understand what you’re saying.  I almost wouldn’t know how to speculate on what that meant to Norman [Felton].  I think that accurately describes my work.  I always found it difficult to develop a story that did not have some kind of moral thematic drive to it.

Because that’s what interested you about writing?  More than plot or character?

Yes.  Right.

A rather vague question, but did one usually come to you before the other: the story or the thematic idea that it expressed?

I’ve never been posed that question, nor have I posed it to myself – which came first.  I really think it was all part of the package.  If I’m going to do a story about a drought-stricken community that prays for rain, then just going into it there are thematic moral parameters that are going to get involved because they’re important.  And useful.

Useful in telling the story?

Yes.  And not only in theory, but right down to the mechanics of the second act curtain.  I mean: This is going to give me a good freeze-frame.

Wasn’t it a struggle, even then, to write television scripts that were that cerebral?  For instance, I can’t imagine The Man For U.N.C.L.E. allowing for that kind of writing.

No, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was playing a video game.  It was toy time.  For me.  I did try to bend those scripts enough that – I did one [that was] a parody of – I did Faust, in The [Girl] From U.N.C.L.E.  It was fun.  I did what later became The Producers, Mel Brooks’ big hit.  I’m not implying that I stole from Mel or that he stole from me, goodness knows.  But the premise [is] this Off-Broadway theatre that THRUSH, the bad guys, are using in their evilness, and they need it to stay just as it is, and in order to do this they’re going to keep a show running in that Off-Broadway theatre.  A bad show.  It’s got to be a bad show.  And that’s the premise of The Producers.  So I did it on U.N.C.L.E., and it worked great.

My only disappointment was, I wanted it to be an original musical comedy, in that form.  I got a good friend of mine, Mary Rodgers, who is Richard Rodgers’s daughter and a composer herself, to agree to write the music.  I thought that was an achievement, and I knew she’d be great.  I wrote these lyrics for the numbers, and before Mary even joined the project or was ready to join the project, the composer on the show, a gentleman whose name I conveniently forget, wasn’t about to let anybody come in.  Weekly he scores these shows, you know, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and they’re going to do an original musical on it, and they’re going to bring in a woman from New York to write music?  No way!  All sorts of strings were pulled that I didn’t know about at the time, to ensure that that wasn’t going to happen.

An Interview With Seamon Glass

One of the great faces on the margins of your television screen belongs to the man pictured above: Seamon Glass.  Initially a boxer and a stuntman, Glass became a familiar figure in movies and television episodes as his imposing, 6’3” physique and rough features made him a go-to guy for thugs, bums, and various other tough guys and ne’er-do-wells.

Along with his dozens of guest parts on television, which included a fistful of Perry Masons and a bit part in the famous Star Trek episode “Mudd’s Women,” Glass appeared in films including Spartacus, Deliverance, Slither, Damnation Alley, and The Rose.  Early in his career, he played the lead role in 1962’s This Is Not a Test, a strange independent film about nuclear war that has a small cult following today.

Last fall, I watched an episode of Vega$ (yes, there was a reason; long story) in which Glass (above), mute and clad in a black turtleneck, made a strong impression as a gunsel doing the bidding of top-billed baddies Cesar Romero and Moses Gunn.  What kind of an off-screen life does an actor like that lead? I wondered, and looked up Glass’s number.

Amiable and forthright, Glass hastened to point out that his memory had been somewhat impaired by a stroke a few years ago.  But if some of his days as a day player had become fuzzy, Glass was still able to answer my main question, as he filled in some of the fascinating backstory behind his part-time life as an actor – and the dozen or so other professions he pursued to supplement his celluloid pastime.

 

How did you get into the movie business?

I was a boxer.  I had about 41 amateur fights and about six professional ones.  Sort of at the end of that, there were actors and producers and directors that would come to the gym on 4th Street, and they wanted to learn how to box, but they didn’t want to get hit.  They didn’t want to get hurt.  So I would work out with them.  So I got my first job on You Asked For It.  I used to work out with the director, Fred Gadette.  He got me started in AFTRA.  I worked on Divorce Court, Day in Court, and I did one movie [for Gadette] which was called This Is Not a Test.

A couple of other actors and directors got me into SAG.  My first job was Spartacus.  I worked on Spartacus as a stunt man.  I never met any of the principal actors at all, though.  We did it on the beach about thirty miles up from where I live in Santa Monica.  We rode out [into the ocean], came back in, and they’re fighting on the beach, and a horse takes a crap between the camera and the boat, so they said, “All right, do it again.”  So we do it again, and the second time we come in we’re broadside.  You know what that means?  On a boat if you come in sideways, it doesn’t look good.  So we did it a third time – there was about ten of us on the boat, all dressed like Spartans – and they gave each of us about 600 bucks.  It cost about 250 to get into SAG at that time, so I thought, “Should I join SAG or should I just go out and have a ball?”  The best thing I ever did – I joined SAG.  And after that, I started getting a number of shows and it went on and on.

Did you do a lot of other stunt work?

I did fight stunts, because I used to be a boxer.  I did some of those, and then I started getting picture work, small stuff.  I’m not a trained actor.  I did go to a couple of classes after I started, but I never became a dedicated actor, let me put it that way.

Well, you had a very distinctive face – I imagine that was an important asset.

That helped.  I had a face that they liked.  Then they liked what I did, so they gave me another job.

If you weren’t a dedicated actor, how did you make a living?

I was a teacher and a counselor for three different districts, but I retired from L.A. Unified.  I spent about 27 years with them.  But I had two teaching jobs before that with two years apiece, so altogether I put in about 31 years.

How did you balance that with the film jobs?

Well, it did get in the way.  For instance, I worked on that Elvis Presley show, Kid Galahad.  They wanted me for a week.  Then it went for two weeks, and then they wanted me to go for three weeks.  I went for three weeks, and then they said they wanted me to go for six weeks, and the principal said, “Either get back or you’re finished.”  I thought, “Well, I’m not going to become an actor,” so I quit, and all the actors said I was crazy.  Maybe I was.

Are you still in the movie?  How did they work around your departure?

I’m in the movie, but they had to cut out part of my lines.  At the beginning they show me boxing, that’s all.  They were really pissed off.

Where there other times where that happened?

Yeah, another time it happened with Captain Newman, M.D.  I was kind of like a psycho in the hospital.  Same thing.  They said a week.  Okay, I did a week.  Went to two weeks.  Then they wanted me to go six, seven weeks and the principal said, “Either that or [teaching].”  And I never felt like I was going to be an actor, since I wasn’t trained.  There’s a lot of time in between when you get called, and I just didn’t like the idea of sitting by the telephone all the time.

Glass (right) as a criminal in an episode of Lawbreaker (1964).

Did you have an agent?

Yeah.  I’m sure you never heard of him, but his name was Hugh French.  He was a friend of mine.  He’d always call me and he wanted me to go to a striptease joint or a bar or something.  He was an Englishman, and he lived in the Malibu Colony.  He really supported me.  I was the only nobody he had.  He had all big stars.  He had Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.  One day he calls me – this is before Richard Burton did anything in the United States – and he says, “Did you ever hear of Richard Burton?”  I said, “Never heard of him.”  He said, “Nobody has, but everybody’s going to hear of him.”  Do you know where Chez Jay is?

Oh, yeah, that little dinky place ….

That dinky place near the pier.  I live a couple of hundred yards away from there.  Hugh says, “I want you to meet Richard Burton.”  I says, “Yeah, all right.”  I was in the merchant marines and I’d just got off a giant freighter.  I said, “Hugh, I just paid all my bar bills and I’m broke.”  He said, “I’ll pick up the tab.”  Well, he wasn’t the type of guy that picked up tabs often, so I went with him.

Richard Burton, we’re drinking there together, and I thought I could drink.  This guy buried me.  Triple shots, he was drinking.  [French] said, “I’ve got a proposition for you.  Richard Burton’s going to become big, and he needs a bodyguard.  How about the job?”  Well, I had just gotten off a ship and I had gotten a teaching position.  I thought, if I go with this guy, I’m going to be drinking and carousing.  So I turned it down.

So you were an actor, a teacher, and a sailor?

You know what the merchant marine is?  You don’t wear a uniform, but you work on ships.  You don’t get paid like the military do, you get paid very well.  I shipped out in the merchant marine off and on for about twelve years.  I would start getting bored.  I used to teach and I’d get tired of it and ship out.  I liked sitting on a ship and I liked going to see all these foreign, exotic parts.

Hugh French became my agent, and you know why he dropped me?  When school was out, I went down to the harbor to sign up, and there was what they called a pierhead jump: Get on the ship right now, because it’s leaving and they’re shorthanded.  So I took it.  And when I got back, a couple of months later, everybody in every bar in town – I used to drink a lot – and in every bar in town they were saying, “Hugh French was looking for you.”  He had me where I didn’t even need an audition and I had a job on a John Wayne movie, and I blew it.  He was so upset he dropped me as a client.

Wait, now, this just occurred to me: You were a seaman and your name is Seamon.

It wasn’t spelled the same.

But, still, it must’ve been a subject of mirth among your fellow sailors.

Oh, yeah.  In the Marine Corps they really gave me hell about it.

It’s an unusual name.

My mother and father were born in Poland.  They told me it comes from the Bible, the Old Testament, but I’ve tried to find out [and] I can’t do it.

Was Glass derived from a Polish name?

Well, they were Polish Jews.  Their ancestors came from Germany.  I think it was originally Altglas, which means “old glass” in German.

Did you go to school on the G.I. Bill?

Yeah, I went on the G.I. Bill.  I had a disability from the service, which I still do.  A hearing aid from a bombing attack in the Marshall Islands.  I was in the Marines during World War II.  I had my 18th birthday in British Samoa, which is now Western Samoa.  Robert Louis Stevenson is buried on top of the mountain there.  Then I spent my 19th birthday in the Marshalls, and my 20th somewhere at sea.  I was a good Marine but I was in the brig four times.  And for nothing that I was ashamed of!

I never finished high school, so I had to go to junior college and get my high school credits.  I went to Santa Monica Junior College.  I became the heavyweight champion of Santa Monica Junior College, which got me into boxing.  Then when I went back to sea – I was doing some commercial fishing too; actually, poaching lobsters – I got some kind of illness, and I went back to live with my mother in East L.A.  Belvedere, near Boyle Heights.  My father passed away when I was eleven.  He was an engineer.  Then my poor mother had to put up with me all the time.  I went to East L.A. Junior College as I recovered and graduated there, before I went to Cal State L.A.  In between I would ship out.

What subjects did you teach?

I taught in elementary school for about fifteen years, and then I took a couple of classes and went into a junior high school Pacoima.  It’s a tough neighborhood in the Valley.  Then I went to Lawndale, [where] all the students were from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas.  Their families were following the fruit, and then they got jobs in the airplane [factories].  When I went to [interview] for it, in those days if you were a teacher you had to wear a tie, in every place, but not in Lawndale.  So I took the job there, and it was the biggest mistake, because they gave me what the kids called the tough class.  Every third day some kid’d come in and say, “I want to get into the tough class.”  I’d say, “Well, we’re all filled up.”  Then they’d go out and act up and so they’d put’em in my class.  So after two years, I went back to sea.

Then when I came back I passed the test for L.A.  But my first job was in Alturas, which is a small country town where Oregon and Nevada touch the California line.  The reason I took that job is, I got a paper from the principal that said “Hunting, fishing, skiing, small town.”  I’d never been to a small town.  I’m from Brooklyn!  I left when I was thirteen to come to California, but I was born in New York.  So I went there and it was two great years of teaching, except they were all lumberjacks and cowboys.  Real cowboys.  And railroad men, but there were no railroads that went through the town.  They threw me in jail one day, and guess who bailed me out?  The PTA.

Then the last phase of your teaching career was at Fairfax High in Hollywood.

Yeah.  I went in as an English teacher, but I didn’t particularly care for English as much as I liked social studies, so I ended up teaching social studies.  And in the last fifteen years I was a counselor.

Which of your television appearances do you remember?  You were on Perry Mason a number of times.

About eight times.  There was a producer who lived in Malibu, Art Seid, and he used to get me most of the jobs there.  I knew him socially.  I used to play chess with one of the Perry Mason regulars, and he got really pissed off because I beat him – William Hopper.

I did a couple of The Beverly Hillbillies.  When I was a kid, Max Baer himself would come walking down the beach, and he was a very impressive-looking guy.  This was after he quit boxing.  Max Baer, Jr., was a big, nice guy, but nothing like his father as far as being physically intimidating.

Ron Ely used to come to the gym to learn how to box.  Basically he got better than I was.  Then he got Tarzan and he said, “If I ever get a chance, I’ll get you some work.”  So one day he called me from Mexico.  Then he got me a job in Mexico City, and I was the heavy, the bad guy.  We fought, and of course he beat me up in the picture.  I was there about three or four weeks.  It was a really good job.

Don Murray’s another guy I met at the gym, and boxed with him without hurting him.  He has a couple of kids, and I was teaching them how to box.  He got me a couple of jobs.  He got me a job and I was supposed to ride a horse.  I’m not too comfortable on a horse, and this was bareback!

Glass (center, top) in Kojak (“The Chinatown Murders,” 1974) and Mannix (“To Quote a Dead Man,” 1973).

And what about your feature films – which ones stand out for you?

I had an on-camera fight with Woody Allen.  Sleeper is where he wakes up in the future.  I’m chasing him, I’m a guard.  Then we’re fighting and I’m really knocking myself out, because I didn’t want to hurt him.  In fact, he bloodied my nose, because he made a mistake.  He was very apologetic.

I was in Enemy of the People, with Steve McQueen.  I was a stuntman.  I did about a week on it and took us all out of the movie.  [The original director] got fired, and they fired all of us.  They fired anything that George Schaefer hired.

You know who Charles Pierce was?  I did about six movies for him.  I liked him.  He was an absolutely non-Hollywood type.  He’s from Texarkana.  He saw me in Deliverance, and that’s how I got the [first] picture.

You were in The Norsemen for him ….

One of the worst pictures that was ever made.  It was horrible.

Ha!  Why?

Well …. Charlie was a con man, but really a likeable one, not an evil one that’s gonna hurt anybody.  The Norsemen, we went to Florida to do it, and – do you remember who Deacon Jones was?  A black football player.  I said, “Charlie, you can’t have a black Norseman.  They didn’t have them!”  He said, “Okay, we’ll make him a slave.”  So he did.  But Charlie was one of the luckiest guys, and a con man of the first order.  He’d go into these studios and talk ’em into sponsoring a picture.  He could sell.  I really liked him.  I did a picture in Montana with him, and two in Arkansas, I think.  Hawken [retitled Hawken’s Breed] was Tennessee, but I don’t think it was ever finished.  They ran out of money or something.

What was it like when you’d share a scene with a big star or a renowned actor, like Henry Fonda?

I wanted to do a good job, but I wasn’t awestruck.  There were some of them I just didn’t care for, personally.

Such as?

Well, I didn’t like Tony Curtis.  Just because one time I walked out of the studio door and I didn’t know he was behind me, and the door slammed in his face and he really got upset about it.

Which movie stars did you like?

Gregory Peck, I really respected him.  Even though I never got to converse [or] get social with him, I just liked his demeanor and the way he did his business.  I thought he was very mature, and a gentleman, put it that way.  I liked Elvis Presley.  I thought he was a good guy.  He gave me a pair of boxing shoes.

What did your students think about your acting career?

[Chuckles.]  They went to see everything I did.  A couple of those backfired.  They wrote a criticism – the director really jumped all over me about it.  They wrote a fan letter.  They said, “It was a lousy picture, but Mr. Glass was good!”  The director really got pissed off at me.   I went up for another part with him [and] he told me about it.  I said, “I didn’t do it!”  He thought I [had written the letter].

I’ll bet you have lots of “on the fringes of Hollywood” stories.

You remember Anna Maria Alberghetti?  I got called in by Hugh French one time.  Her agent was there.  They said, “Anna Maria Alberghetti, we gotta promote her, and she needs a fighter.”  So I became her fighter.  I’ve only had six professional fights, but she was my manager.  Got a lot of publicity.  I trained, and I fought Big Bob Albright.  He eventually fought for the title.  I went out there and I thought, “Gee, if I can knock this guy out, I’ll really go someplace.”  But I lost.

(From an AP story of April 29, 1960, entitled “Flyweight Anna Maria Enters World of Pugs”: “She’s a fight manager.  She is also very well-known as a singer – at the Met in New York, the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, and other plush joints.  ‘Yes, it’s true.  I’m a manager now,’ said Miss Alberghetti, her big, brown eyes shiny.  ‘That’s him, over there.  He’s a young prospect, they say.’  ‘Him’ is Seaman Glass [sic], a heavyweight.  Miss Alberghetti happily explained that her manager, Pierre Cossette, figured she ought to invest a few dollars in something other than real estate or banks or the entertainment business.  ‘So we got him.  Isn’t he wonderful?’  Glass came over and offered a huge paw to shake …. She posed for a photographer, with Seaman pressing a glove against her cheek.  Later Anna Maria whispered, ‘Those gloves sure do smell, don’t they?’ …. Seaman was boxing around here long before she wore pigtails, and … in 1955 he retired after getting flattened in a preliminary on the Art Aragon-Vince Martinez card …. [Now], at the age of 34, Glass was attempting a comeback …. ‘Yes, I’m 34 but I like to box,’ said good-natured Glass.  ‘But somehow I get tensed up in the ring.'”)

I was Darryl Zanuck’s daughter’s bodyguard.  Her name was Darrylin.  Bobby Jacks, a producer, was a friend of mine.  When he and Darrylin separated, before they got divorced, he asked me to be her bodyguard.  So I lived on a Malibu ranch with her for a number of months.  I had just got off a merchant ship.  Pretty soon she needed protection from me!

What do you mean by that?

Darrylin was driving up and down Santa Monica Canyon in her convertible, and I was sitting in one of the restaurants, and she was yelling, “Seamon Glass is fired!  Seamon Glass is fired!”  I went outside and said, “You can’t fire me, Darrylin.”  She says, “Why not?”  “Because I quit!”  But we got along pretty good.  She was very pretty, and a very skilled surfboarder.  I never met Darryl, but she said that he had people following me.  Then about a year later she opened up a dress shop in Santa Monica Canyon and asked me to be the maitre d’, because she had a lot of important people coming in.  She called it the maitre d’, but I was a bouncer.  She hired me to be in it when they opened up for four or five days, just so there wouldn’t be any drunken actors – I don’t want to repeat their names – they came in.

And Chez Jay sounds central to your life and career.

I started tending bar at Sinbad’s, which is on the Santa Monica Pier.  A lot of actors went in there.  Jay [Fiondella] and I were tending bar and I was, modestly speaking, the second worst bartender in town.  Jay was the worst.  But he was a good-looking guy, and the girls would just flock into that place.  Some really wealthy guy [whose] hobby was opening up bars and putting people he liked in there, he put Jay in there [in Chez Jay].  Jay was giving the joint away.  His mother, who was about 70 years old, was a teacher in Connecticut, and she came and straightened the whole place out.  Everybody idolized her.  I was among the guys who sent her a Mother’s Day card for twelve or thirteen years.  She was crossing the street one day and some associate producer who was a total idiot went around a car and killed her.  He was in a hurry to get to the airport.  Jay was lost without her.

Jay (using the name Jay Della) was a part-time actor, too, right?

Oh, he started way before I did.  He did a lot of acting.  But they usually cut him out, because he was a terrible actor.

You also practice yoga, and you wrote a novel (Half-Assed Marines) about World War II.  What other vocations have you had?

For about seventeen years, while teaching, as a summer job I worked as a harbor patrolman on the pier.  I wrote for the local newspaper for twenty years.  It went belly-up about five or six years ago.  First it was called The Santa Monica Independent, then it was called The Good Life.  I had a whole column.  I wrote about all the losers and characters in town.

In the early eighties, your acting career came to a fairly abrupt halt.

About 1983, somebody – an American – wrote me a letter from China and said there was a job teaching English as a second language in China.  I’d been to Hong Kong, which had belonged to the British at the time, and so I took it.  I went to China, taught for a year, in a place called Hangzhou, of which Marco Polo said in the 5th Century, “It’s heaven on earth.”  It really is a gorgeous place.  And I met a girl there, came back, then took another job in China, in Guangzhou, where they don’t speak Mandarin, they speak Cantonese.  So I went there and I married the girl that I’d met in Hangzhou.  We’re still married; that’s twenty years.  She’s a lot younger than I am.  In fact, I got her into show business – when she came here, she got a national commercial on the Superbowl, and then a couple of other things and a couple of modeling jobs and then she said, “I don’t want to do this any more.”  Her name is Yan Zhang.

Did you enjoy acting?  Was it satisfying creatively?

Yeah, it was, but it was nothing I wanted to devote myself to.  You know, I did a couple of plays with guys that were really good, devoted, dedicated actors, that loved to do the stuff.  I never loved it.  I enjoyed it because it was a change from the regular routine.  I never got into the social life of acting, and producing, and directing.  I never got friendly with them.  There’s a lot of kissin’ ass in that business, let me put it that way.  I can understand people doing it, but it didn’t attract me at all.

Sidebar: Joy Munnecke Remembers Playhouse 90

During the final two seasons of Playhouse 90, Joy Munnecke was a story consultant (and something of an all-purpose production staffer) for the segments produced by Herbert Brodkin.  In a recent interview, Munnecke talked about working for Brodkin, the famous “Judgment at Nuremberg” censorship, and how women functioned in fifties television.

How did you get started on Playhouse 90?

At that time I had been working at Studio One, which transferred from New York to Hollywood.  I was with Norman Felton’s unit.  Norman and I both came from Herb Brodkin’s production company in New York.  When Studio One went to Hollywood [in 1957], Herb did not want to go.  I don’t know whether they asked him; I don’t think they did.  But his second-in-command, Norman Felton, was going to go.  When Studio One [went] on hiatus in the summer, Norman Felton took over, and many of the people, particularly the producers, took a vacation.  So Norman Felton stepped up one notch, and Phil Barry [associate producer Philip Barry, Jr.] went one notch and I went one notch.  My notch was from secretary to assistant story editor.  We did the summer ones, and then it went to Hollywood.

When Herb Brodkin was asked to do [Playhouse 90], he pulled us all together again.  The first one I worked on was, I think, “The Velvet Alley,” which is 1958, I think it was.

One of the things Herb did that I thought was very big and wonderful: In New York Herb Brodkin had a director by the name of Alex Segal.  He was pretty much of a genius, but very hard to work for.  I was a production assistant for him.  When I say hard to work for – they yell at each other, you know, in the theater sometimes.  And it’s difficult.  There were articles about Alex, because he was a very emotional director.  He was doing The U.S. Steel Hour and Herb was doing The Elgin Hour.  The rivalry was tremendous, because of how many people were tuning in, and who was getting which stars, and what were the budgets.  They were very competitive.  But in Playhouse 90, Herb, for the first time, asked Alex to come and direct one of the shows.  Alex came and everything was fine, no problems.  It was a lovely experience to see two people who had been such rivals growing up, as it were – saying, okay, we can do it together.

How did the Playhouse 90 producers – Brodkin, John Houseman, Fred Coe, and to a lesser extent Peter Kortner – divide up the episodes?

The four producers didn’t work together.  They had different offices, different staff, and so forth.  Our offices were right next to Fred Coe’s unit, so you’d kind of overlap.  You knew people.  But we were really kind of competitive about who’s got a better script, and who knows which writer, and that sort of thing.

From September to October, four weeks, would be one producer [staging episodes], and then another producer would do four, or three.  But they all were working at the same time.  While one of us was in rehearsal, the other was looking for scripts, and working with the writers or whatever.  So you had time to really prepare the things, and I think that’s one of the reasons why Playhouse 90 was so good.  It’s as though it was a Broadway opening every Thursday night.  You did quite a bit of preparatory work.

What were your duties?  You were a story editor?

Mostly my credit was “story consultant.”  I looked for scripts, [and] to find ideas for plays.  Anything that was submitted would come first to me, except of course for writers who were known to the producer.  When an idea or a story came, it would have to be synopsized and sent to the network executives, who would look at it and see whether they felt this was a good idea.  It would have to pass by them.  Then it would go into a first draft, a second draft, and whatever.  I would be part of the whole situation in the story development, from the idea to the end of it.  In a way, it was a kind of selling of the idea to the network so that they wouldn’t get upset about things.  There were some stories that they never wanted to touch, and those were all because of economic reasons.  For example, the southern states would not want to see anything that would have too many people who were black, or whatever.  So you had all those things to try to get through the network.

Backing up for a moment, how did you first come to work for Herbert Brodkin in New York?

I started in the news department at ABC as a gofer, sort of.  But I did want to go with a dramatic show, because that was my training in school.  The Elgin Watch company wanted to have a show, and Herb Brodkin was going to be the producer.  I said, “Well, I’d like, really, to leave news.”  I was there when they did the Army-McCarthy hearings.  That was a very exciting time.

What were you doing during the hearings?

When I was working there, like anybody just out of college, I just wanted to work on a show.  The only show that they wanted to put me into was Walter Winchell’s show, and I would just be in there on a Sunday afternoon for the broadcast.  But I got to know the different people, and I became the secretary of the head of special events, John Madigan.  He had been in radio news.  This was in 1953, and they were putting a lot of people from radio into television.

The secretaries in the programming department had a little earphone on their desk, and you were expected to listen in on all the conversations so that you knew what was going on all the time.  If [the newsmen] had to know something on the telephone, you’d slip [them] a little paper and say “This is what that is.”  Anyway, I kept getting telephone calls, and Madigan kept saying, “No, I won’t talk to this man.”  It was Roy Cohn, the right-hand man of Senator McCarthy.  He wanted very much to get some publicity.  John Madigan said, “No.  Just keep telling him no until I say go.  Then I’ll take the call.”  So the time came when he knew it was right to get the network to cover the hearings.  In those days, one of the three major networks would take the pool, and they took all the equipment to save everything duplicating.  ABC did the whole Army-McCarthy hearings out of their 7 West 66th office, which had been a riding academy.

Anyway, from the news department, then, I started with Herb Brodkin as his secretary.  That was The Elgin Hour, and then he was hired to go over to NBC to do the Alcoa-Goodyear show.  I went over with the Brodkin unit.  They brought the casting people, and I wanted to go more towards the literary end of it, and worked there briefly as a production assistant but then as an assistant story editor, because they didn’t want to jump you too soon.  There wasn’t a story editor, so I was the assistant when there was nobody to assist.  Then they decided to change it to story consultant, because what we found was that most writers don’t like to have an “editor” coming at them.  The writers would say to me, “I like having a consultant.  I can bounce things over with you and it won’t be edited.  It’s not somebody who’s going to want to change my script.”

So I would go through the whole production experience that way, starting with sometimes looking for material and thinking about who might be the good writer to write it.  You see, by coming through the assistant way of being a secretary to someone, you knew what sort of thing they wanted to do.  Herbert Brodkin was particularly interested in doing a lot of things from the holocaust.  And of course I was aware of “Judgment at Nuremberg” from the very beginning.  The story idea was from Herb Brodkin to [writer] Abby Mann.

Really?  It originated with Brodkin rather than Abby Mann?

Yes.  That was really an assignment.  I think they just sort of talked about it.  I can remember that we just called it “the Nuremberg trials story.”  Those things happened that way.

Why was Brodkin interested in the holocaust, particularly?

He was Jewish, and I think he just felt that it should be understood and people should be aware of this, and not just push it under the rug.  He was a very sensitive and very bright man, and very difficult to work with, because he didn’t have any patience with superficial nonsense, if you know what I mean.  I think it was part of his integrity.  Integrity was a very important word with him.  I mean, there was still a great deal of anti-semitism in the country, and he felt that he wanted people to realize that it was pretty horrible in its extreme.

What do you recall about the famous incident of muting the references to the gas chambers?

We knew that this would be trouble.  Brodkin said, “I don’t care.  This story should be told as it is, and if we move people, it’s good.  It’s not bad.”  And I don’t think anybody really thought it through that the Gas Company was our sponsor.

What was the nature of the objections raised by the sponsor?

Someone said this must be very difficult, and someone with an engineering background – on the screen, [a character] said “This must be very difficult,” and someone said “Oh, it’s not difficult at all, all you have to do is put the [gas] through the pipes and so on.”  Instead of saying it’s difficult to kill another human being – oh, it’s not difficult, it’s easy.  That bothered people, I think.  Yes.  Anything that was disturbing, they had to be convinced that it was a good thing.  They don’t want to offend people.  They don’t want to move people too much.  And the artists, of course, all they wanted to do was to move people and to have a statement.  And Herb Brodkin had a very different feeling of these things as being a force for good.  So he would broach no argument from these people.  He would say, “No, this is the way the story is going to be done, and let’s see what happens.”

My feeling about it is that it probably [would have been] a much simpler thing to have done it on a week when the Gas Company wasn’t the sponsor.  But Herb just said to do it anyway.  That’s your problem whether it’s the Gas Company, was his point [with CBS].  So as it happened, at the last minute, it was the network that did it, that took out the word.  Which was stupid, you know.  But on the other hand, I think if anybody wanted to make a splash, they certainly did!

It was very conspicuous.

Yes, exactly that.  It just called attention to it.  And I don’t think the artistic people minded a bit to get the publicity for it.

What was Brodkin’s reaction to the outcome?

That it was just the commercial instincts overshadowing the artistic, and he was quite furious with it.  He had many arguments with these people, and he wasn’t too diplomatic about things.  But he was, as I say, he was always fighting for the integrity of the artists.

Were there any Playhouse 90s that you would personally take some credit for having developed?

Yes, I do remember one particularly.  The short story “Tomorrow,” by Faulkner, came to my attention [from] someone in the story department, and I read it and I said, “How about Horton Foote?”  That was a successful one, and it became a very good film [in 1972].  Before that time, Horton Foote had done one or two shows for Herb, but he worked mostly with the Fred Coe unit.

Which of the major live TV writers do you associate with Brodkin?

Reginald Rose.  Do you know [Rose’s Alcoa Hour script] “Tragedy in a Temporary Town”?  That is the first time they ever said “goddamn” on television.  And that was a horrible problem for me, because I had to answer 2,000 letters from people!

The story in that one was about prejudice against Mexicans; the temporary town was a trailer park, and some girl was upset because she was being accosted by some boy.  They thought it must be one of the Mexican kids, but it turned out to be an Anglo-Saxon, blue-eyed blond kid.  It became a riot between these people in this trailer park, and a whole lot of people were storming through the trailers, and Lloyd Bridges had a stick in his hand.  I don’t think many people really know this story this way, but this is the way I heard it told: He hit the stick against the fence or something and the stick broke in half.  And he said “Goddamn it!” because the stick broke, and it came over the microphone.  People wrote in and said, “I fell off the sofa when I heard that on television!”

Well, Herb said, “Let’s just not tell anybody that it was because the stick broke, but just say that he was upset because of [the content of] the script.”  We had to have the star and the script have some basis for swearing on television.

So Brodkin could take a controversy like that and spin it to his advantage.

Yes.  It was a question of survival.

There was a Jewish group in New York called the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith, and they gave an award to people who were [fighting] prejudice.  It was a nice monetary award.  It was given in June, and we were on hiatus, but I was still working in the office.  I was asked to go to the luncheon and pick up these $5,000 checks for the three people involved in the production of “Tragedy of a Temporary Town.”  The producer [Brodkin] was in his summer home, and I sent his to him, and the other ones were for the writer and the director: Reginald Rose and Sidney Lumet.  So after the luncheon I took the check down to Greenwich Village, where they were in a film studio.  As I came in, the bell rang for silence, and I said, “Oh, I’m going to get out,” and Reggie said, “No, no, no.  Stand here.  You’re bringing us these checks – this is good luck!  We’re doing our very first scene in our very first film.”  And it was Henry Fonda opening the window in 12 Angry Men.

Were you the only woman on Herbert Brodkin’s creative staff at that time?

No, Joan MacDonald was the casting director.  She was outstanding.  Probably my mentor in many ways.  And there were a lot more.  Women were very welcome in television.  Herb was the same with women or men.  Maybe a woman wouldn’t be thought of for a technical job so much or anything, but that was very prevalent in that period.

I mean, it wasn’t quite like the way it is in Mad Men.  I did work in advertising, where [sexism] was more prevalent, as it is in the series.

You mean it’s more sexist in Mad Men than what you experienced?

Yes.  Advertising was more like that, but I didn’t feel that in broadcasting – there were women there.  There were women who were assistant directors.  Particularly at ABC.  That was kind of the tag-along network at that time.  They were a little more informal.

I remember I said to Norman Felton, “I’d like to go to Hollywood.  I think that’s where television’s going to be.”  He asked, “Well, would you like to be the story editor with Studio One in Hollywood?”  I said, “Yes, I would.”  I didn’t know what [salary] to ask; I didn’t have an agent.  So I went to Herb Brodkin and I said, “Norman asked me what I’d like to have in compensation.”  Herb said, “Don’t ask for more money.  You don’t have any leverage for anything like that.  Just ask for a credit.”  So I [asked for] the assistant editor credit.  Then when I worked for Norman and Herb wanted me back to work on Playhouse 90, I went to Norman and he told me what to ask for for compensation.  So they kind of told me how to bargain [with each other], as you do in business to go up a notch.  That was sort of the way people were helpful to one another.

Were you treated as an equal by the men?  By the writers you were working with, in particular?

Being on the team – it’s like a family.  You’re either welcome in the meeting or not, you know?  And sometimes you’re welcome because you smile and nod and say, “Oh, that’s wonderful.”  That doesn’t sound like much of a contribution, but it is, in the way things go in a company of players, you know what I’m saying?  Then you get trusted and then maybe you can say, “But why are you doing that?”

Reginald Rose was so close to Herb, I didn’t have any input with anything he did.  In my experience with Reggie, it was just making things pleasant in the office, and [making certain] that everybody knew what was going on, and that sort of thing.  But it wasn’t that I could touch his scripts.  So I was just in the group to get the coffee and do whatever was necessary.  I wouldn’t have presumed to say, “You’ve got a weak second act” or something like that.

With a more junior writer, like Mayo Simon or Loring Mandel, would you behave differently?

Yes, they would come and maybe tell me a little bit of their problems.  The only thing about creative people that I felt that I could do was to make it comfortable for them, in an intellectual way.  Like a book editor would be.  You’re not going to write the book for them, but you might say, “I don’t know about that thing.”  But these people knew what they were doing, usually.

Did you ever work with Rod Serling?

That’s one of my favorite memories.  When I first was assigned to The Elgin Hour, there was a girl who was working on the thing, and she said, “Oh, some of these people are horrible, hard to work with, these writers, they’re awful!”  And she said, “But, oh, it’s interesting, there’s this one guy.  He’s awfully nice.  Can’t write a thing.  But he’s so nice, you just wouldn’t realize he’s a writer!  You just have to remember, just don’t put a ‘t’ in his name.  It’s not Sterling, it’s Serling.”  I often think of that when people say all artists are temperamental.  He was one of the nicest people you would ever want to know.  Just a regular sort of person who knew everybody’s name and talked to everybody.

What happened when Playhouse 90 ended?

It didn’t end with a bang but with a whimper.  Brodkin went back to New York and he was going to do The Nurses and The Defenders.  He asked me to go back to New York and work on the show, but I didn’t want to.  I wanted to stay in California.  I was still under contract to CBS, to work with the story people.  John Houseman came in to do a show, and some other people were doing shows.  One of the things I would do at the end is, they would have one of the actors come and have a little spiel about the next week’s show, and I’d have to write that.

What did you do after you left CBS?

I had the most horrible time, because you can’t go from the palace, as it were, to start working in something else.  So I got married [to CBS executive Charles Schnebel]!  I worked for a short while at PBS, as a kind of assistant producer, and again in the news department at KCET here in California.  But I never did find a niche in television again, because I think I was really quite spoiled to work on those dramatic shows.  People would say, “We don’t do the anthology type shows any more,” and they didn’t trust me for a series, because it was an entirely different thing.

It was a fascinating and stimulating place to be, and I didn’t realize it at the time, I don’t think.

An Interview With Ralph A. Woolsey

Ralph Woolsey was born before World War I.

Woolsey, who turned 100 on January 1, is best known the cinematographer on more than a dozen cult and exploitation movies of the 1970s, some of them outliers in the New Hollywood movement of innovative, European-influenced studio filmmaking: The Lawyer; The Strawberry Statement; Little Fauss and Big Halsy; Deadhead Miles; The Culpepper Cattle Co.; The New Centurions; Dirty Little Billy; Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins; Lifeguard; Mother, Jugs & Speed; and The Great Santini.  Woolsey photographed The Mack as well as The Pack, and two features for John Frankenheimer, The Iceman Cometh and 99 44/100% Dead.

Before he transitioned into features, though, Woolsey was a prolific director of photography in television.  He made a comparatively late entry into the medium via Warner Bros., which needed a large corps of DPs to churn out the suddenly popular Westerns and private eye shows that put its TV department on the map in the late fifties.  Fast and cheap, the Warners shows attracted a mix of newcomers and veterans, many of them favored more for speed than talent.

After Warner’s television department faltered in the mid-sixties, Woolsey followed 77 Sunset Strip producer Howie Horwitz to Fox, where he became the original director of photography for Batman.  Next Woolsey moved to Universal, where he worked on It Takes a Thief (for which he won an Emmy) and The Name of the Game.

In June of 2012, I spoke with Woolsey about his career by telephone.  Although many of the shows and the stars (especially at Warners, where DPs rotated among a dozen different shows instead of settling in on just one) were a blur, Woolsey had some fascinating, detailed recollections of the nuts and bolts of his profession and of many of the directors with whom he worked.

How did you get involved with Warner Bros. in the early days of its television operation?

The first show was Maverick.  Basically, I was a freelance cinematographer, while I was teaching in the cinema department at USC.  I did commercials and things like that.  I had an agent who, one day, got me a fill-in job at Warner Bros.  I had never worked at Warner Bros., and it seemed like I was just a short replacement for somebody who was sick.  I went out there, and Warner Bros. was practically shut down at that time.  There wasn’t much going.  Television was just getting started.  There was sort of a legend around there that television was like poison, and they didn’t want anything to do with it.  There were stories about Jack Warner firing actors when he found out that they had TV sets in their dressing rooms.

But anyway, they were at the point that they weren’t making any features.  They were gearing up to do some television shows.  The reason that I got this call was that the cameraman who was going to shoot it – he was a well-known Hollywood guy – was sick.  Not only that, the director, who was another well-known Hollywood guy, also got sick.  So my job was to replace the cameraman, and the guy who was to replace the director was a well-known figure named Howard W. Koch.  He had quite a career at Paramount.  

Now, all the people were hired and the sets were built and the actors were ready and the makeup people were all geared up to go on my say-so.  This was the situation that I stepped in to.  So we went to work and everything went along very smoothly.  Howard Koch was extremely knowledgeable and didn’t waste any time.  As a matter of fact, we were going home on time, which was by most standards of that time was early.

Of course, the camera crew tested me like they would a stranger.  The new boss steps in and takes over, which meant that I had to deal with the art director and the sets that he had arranged and all the other stuff.  But the crew was top-notch and as you might expect at a major studio, the equipment was as good as you could ask for.

Then you started working there full time?

Well, the way it turned out, yes.  We went ahead and finished that show and started another one.  On about the fourth day, my agent, whom I hadn’t seen yet at all, didn’t even know the guy, he showed up on the set.  He came over and he said, “What the hell are you doing here?”  I was puzzled.  I wondered if he had heard some negative comment or complaint or something.  I said, “What do you mean?”  Well, he says, “I don’t know, excepting that the studio wants to sign you for five years.”

And it went on from there.  I did a lot more, but that particular show happened to be Maverick, and that was Warners’ lead show in the television market.  It was a big success.  We were using feature picture sets, which actually made some of the very first shows look fantastic.  On the other hand, you paid a price, because it took longer to work with those sets.  They were more elaborate, took more lighting, and all that.  Eventually, of course, they built sets on separate stages just for the television division.

Did you get to know the producer of Maverick, Roy Huggins?

Well, obviously, he was an organizer.  We people in production didn’t actually brush up against [series producers] that much.  We didn’t have much personal contact with those guys.  Maybe sometimes when you walked out of the screening room you would pass like ships in the night.  As long as everything was going fine, you’d never hear from any of them.  Which was just as well.

At Warners, weren’t you rotated among the different shows rather than staying with a single series for every episode?

That’s true.  Now, you may have had preferences, like I had, for working with certain directors, and I’m sure that some of the directors had the same experience.  Everybody had their favorites.  They scheduled everything out, and it was always fun if you were teamed up with a director that you liked, because that director probably would be more inventive.  

Which directors did you like working with?  Let me mention a few: Leslie H. Martinson?

Les Martinson made good shows, and I enjoyed the results from working with Les.  But he was one of these guys who was always crying about things are taking too long, or [something else].  It was a yes or no situation.  You liked to work with him because he got good shows.  They were assigned to him and they usually turned out pretty well, but you had to go through a certain amount of hand-holding and all that stuff with him.  Like, one day, he said to the assembled group: “I wanted to do this shot but Mr. Woolsey didn’t think it would be a good idea.”  I don’t know what effect my – he was just looking for an excuse not to make the shot himself.  But that was kind of petty stuff, you know.

Why couldn’t he make that shot?

I can’t remember the details, but he – early on, while we were using the big sets that were left over from the features, he would see a beautiful staircase in like a hotel lobby and would immediately want to have several people be featured coming down the staircase.  Later on, on a television set, there wouldn’t be such a thing at all, because everybody knows it’s a time-consuming element for lighting and action and everything else.  So you don’t put that into shows where you want to make some time.

He did funny things.  He was kind of a crybaby about getting his stuff.  Like, he hit his thumb with a hammer one day in a little fit of temper.  It almost seemed deliberate, because it swelled up and over the weekend it was worse.  Monday morning, instead of having gone to a doctor over the weekend or something, he brought it to the set looking absolutely horrible, [to] reinforce the terrible state that he described himself in.  

There were some people that [if they] heard they were going to be teamed up with someone, they would refuse to do it.

It sounds as if that was a difficult relationship with Martinson.

One time I was working at another studio later on when my contract was up, and he was doing a show and he actually asked them to get me.  But as soon as I got to do the show, he was the same old guy.  However, we respected each other’s limitations, I guess.

Douglas Heyes?

Oh, Doug Heyes was one of my favorites.  He a talented writer, because he wrote some of the best shows we ever did.  He was top-notch.  He was a lot of fun.  On a personal level, we got along very well, and we sometimes would see each other outside of work.

He was always very sure of himself.  For instance, when he was directing something like some of the Warner Bros. TV shows, he would come in late, with an armload of doughnuts or cookies or something like that for the crew.  But he would always be late.  The studio production guys didn’t like this at all, and they would lie in wait for him, so when he came into the studio they would have all the lights turned out or something, and then start trying to teach him: “We like what you’re doing, but you’ve got to be on time!”

Did things like that put you in between the director and the production department?

Not really, but of course if they get behind, they’d look for anybody that they could blame.  If, say, the producer came over and said, “What the hell is taking so long?” you would be an idiot if you said, “Well, the director just goes on and on and on, doing rehearsals and this and that.”  Because there is a true saying that of the entire production, the crew and everybody, only the director and the cameraman are in every shot, and you and the director had better get along.

Arthur Lubin?

I enjoyed working with Arthur.  He was particularly talented working with actors.

Richard L. Bare?

Yeah, he was good.  Workmanlike.  Nothing flashy.  Just did the job.

George waGGner?

He would probably be my top favorite.  We used to call him George Wag-ig-ner, because of the double G.  He got into directing films accidentally.  He came to Hollywood from somewhere up north, and he said, “I didn’t even know this was going on.”  But George was a very thorough director.  He gave a lot of attention to every detail.  The sets and the decor, and interesting ways to open a sequence.

So you were aware of some of the regular Warners directors as being more visually creative than others?

Oh, yeah.  That’s certainly true.  There were some where you could do a scene in six different ways and they would be just as happy.  But somebody like George who would have a definite way he would want to open the scene, by looking through some piece of architecture or maybe a bit of closeup action.  Just kicking it off in a more spicy way.

Did the directors mainly leave the lighting to you, or did some of them have input into that?

The directors had nothing to do with the lighting.  No, the lighting was the cinematographer’s bailiwick.  And at Warners we had crews who had been working on pictures for years.  So sometimes they would tend to be a little too fancy or elaborate for a television show.  In other words, you had to say, forget the frosting on the cake and let’s take care of the meat and potatoes first.  But there’s always an opportunity where you can make a set sort of perform on its own.

Did you prefer some of the Warners shows to the others?

Well, first of all, you had to take the attitude that whatever the assignment was for the next two weeks, that’s your favorite show.  If they said you had to shoot only these shows for the rest of your life, which ones would they be?  You’d probably pick the ones with the most interesting actors.  [Or] the longest schedules, which give you more opportunity to concoct something interesting.

Which was your favorite among the Warners shows?

Probably Maverick.

Tell me about your departure from Warner Bros.

I shot the first color [TV] show there at Warners, Mister Roberts.  That was our first color show.  [Then] I went over with the producer of Sunset Strip started a show – well, that was Batman.  I went over and started that.  I think I shot a dozen shows.

Did you like doing Batman?

Yeah.  Mainly because it was something different.  We had split-screen situations, with this character Mister Freeze, for instance.  Half of the screen would be frigid and the other half of the screen would be normal.  And it was always fun working with those actors, because they knew the characters that they portrayed.  People like Burgess Meredith, for instance, who played the Penguin, was outstanding.  

I borrowed the Penguin’s whistle, and he used to blow it with a sort of “honk, honk” sound that everybody knew.  I brought it home and blew it for my kids.  The other kids heard about it and they all came over and they were nuts about it.  Naturally, I had a hard time keeping it from getting stolen, and I had been warned that if that whistle did not come back the next day, I was in deep trouble!

Why did you leave Batman?

Because I got fired.  

Why?

I think we did a dozen or so.  They hadn’t been on the air yet, and everybody was running scared about this or that.  There was some talk about taking too much time preparing some of the shots.  Well, it later turned out they had some prop guys who were drunk half the time, and they were supposed to be preparing or fixing some of the tech-y props that were used on the show.  And you had to wait for them really much too long.  So somebody had to go, and it happened to be me that time.  Fortunately, there was a job [waiting].  I went right back to Warner Bros.  Howard Schwartz came in and took it over.  So I can claim the first dozen or so of Batman.  But people, even today, associate me with Batman.

Were you instrumental in devising the visual signature visual of Batman – the extreme tilted camera angles?

I don’t know, I was not so crazy about it.  I know what they were trying to do – they were trying to give an off-kilter look to the show.  But compared to doing things like that later on, just a few years later we had equipment that would make it much easier to do that.  It was very clumsy, making those few shots.

Do you have any memories of Adam West and Burt Ward?

Well, everybody on the crew used to say, “Those two should save their money.”

Then you shot the pilot for It Takes a Thief.

That grew out of a [made-for-television] feature that we shot up in Montreal during the Expo, with Robert Wagner.  We went up to the Expo and shot the picture for Universal, and it was sold to one of the networks as a pilot for what turned out to be the series It Takes a Thief.

And you stayed with the show.

Yeah, I did maybe a dozen or so, along with some segments of some other TV shows they had going there.

What do you remember about It Takes a Thief?

The Montreal location for the movie was very enjoyable.  Leslie Stevens was the creator and the director.  We were friends to begin with, so we could tell each other if something was lousy, or whether we loved it.  Talk about ideas, you know.

What was he like as a director and producer?

A very creative guy.  Stoney Burke was one he did, and The Outer Limits.  Conrad Hall worked on that, on both of those in fact, and before him, Leslie hired a great cameraman whom we both admired a great deal, Ted McCord.

Right, McCord was Conrad Hall’s mentor, I think.

That’s correct, because Connie was his operator, and he took over when Ted more or less retired.  Connie had graduated from USC Cinema just a year before I started teaching there, so we met a few times but I didn’t get to know him personally too well until somewhat later.

Did you expect to become a cinematographer, or had you planned to remain a teacher?

I think the teaching came accidentally.  I was a cinematographer.  During World War II, I was shooting training films for the U.S. Air Force.  I was not in the military; I was working for an aircraft company, Bell Aircraft.  They were developing the first helicopter.  Before we were in World War II, they were selling planes to Russia, and we were making training films as to how you took care of the planes and serviced them.  So when we got into the war, that program just got magnified.  That’s what I had been doing, so at the end of the war I could call myself a cinematographer.  In fact, I was the head of the unit.

I came to California, and how I got to USC – let’s see, I knew some people who were shooting non-theatrical films.  My working at USC was sort of an accident.  I went down there to see the head of the department about something else, and while I was there the head of the department invited me to do some temporary work.  There were a bunch of servicemen, Navy people, who were using the G.I. Bill.  They had to go back to service and they weren’t getting done, and they hired me and a guy named Irving Lerner to direct these things.  The two of us finished all of the projects for these servicemen.  Just shot them ourselves, and then Irving edited them.  Then the guy who was teaching camera had to leave for some commitment, and they offered me the job of teaching his class.  So I did.  But I had an arrangement where I could shoot stuff on the side.

You won an Emmy for It Takes a Thief.

Yeah, that’s true.  That was the pilot.

What about your work on that show caused it to win, do you think?

Well, do you want me to be truthful or inventive?  I think if the show is different in its concept or its location, the way the location is used, I think that does a long way to making it of great interest to the nominating [committee].  And of course, that show was shot as a movie.  So there was a lot more spent on it.

Do you mean it was a feature film, or a made-for-TV movie?

[It was] meant for TV, but we did shoot it in a rather sketchy way.  In other words, we went there with inadequate lighting for some of the night shots that we did, so we had to get inventive.  We pulled off some pretty good night shooting, and I think had some special processing done on the negative, which of course the studio and the camera department fought me on tooth and nail.

In the 1970s you moved exclusively into shooting feature films.  How did that differ from the work you did in television?

There are things that I could and did do in shooting television that I wouldn’t do in shooting a feature.  In other words, I could experiment more, and I did.  When I was shooting some of these black-and-white Warner Bros. westerns, like Maverick, I fooled around and I even used what some of the people in the production department thought were my secrets.  At least, I never told them how I did some of the things to get a certain kind of look.  

For instance, all the old buildings, the wooden buildings in the backlot that you’d use in a western, like the western street.  If you look at real old black-and-white pictures, the buildings all had a certain kind of a look, and it was because the film was colorblind.  The sky would be white and anything blue would be pretty white, and anything red would be pretty dark.  The more common film, orthochromatic, was sensitive to blue and green but not red.  

A lot of the old pictures, even some of the early movies, were shot with that kind of film.  That had the property of making all the reds look dark.  For instance, you would be crazy if you shoot close-ups of a woman with that kind of film, because her lips would go black, or very dark.  But there were advantages in getting that look, too.  The old buildings really looked old.  In the western street scenes, I used a filter combination to get that look.  And I didn’t tell anybody what it was.  I’d put it in the camera myself, and take it back home with me at night.  And in the camera department, they were furious.  They wanted to know what it was.  Of course, for scenes where I’d shoot close-ups of women, I wouldn’t use it.  But it did lend a very authentic kind of an old-time look to the buildings.  

And there was another big problem: the streets were always photographing extremely light or even white because they were yellow.  Every now and then they’d bring in a truckload of [dirt] and smooth out the street, and it was yellow.  To make it darken down, they used to run a water wagon through the set before anybody worked on it.  They’d create a little mud, and that made it unpleasant to work on.  But with my system, they didn’t have to do that.  People would say, “How come you got those streets darkened down and we didn’t have to water it?”

Who do you remember among the many other cinematographers working at Warner Bros. at that time?

Harold Stine had previously worked in special effects at Paramount or one of those studios, so he was really an expert on the technology.  He gave me one of my best compliments one time.  We actually used to compliment each other, because they would bring some of these guys in and some of their work really was pretty lousy.  But if they had a reputation of being fast, that was evidently how they got the job.  Anyway, Hal said to me one day as we were laughing about that: “Well, one thing about your work: It always looks finished, right up to the corners.”  He said, “Some of these guys, they just light the center and let the rest go.”

The images above are taken from the three first season episodes of Maverick that Woolsey photographed and the pilot for It Takes a Thief.

Sidebar: Everett Chambers Remembers Peyton Place

He only played one decent-sized role in a movie, but critic Jonathan Rosenbaum called that performance “unforgettable.”  In John Cassavetes’s sophomore film, Too Late Blues, the villain, a weaselly musician’s agent named Benny Flowers, is played by a casting director and fledgling producer named Everett Chambers.  Crewcut, compact, and contained, Chambers is truly terrifying as a cunning manipulator of fragile egos who seems to be just barely in control of a nearly psychopathic rage.

But Chambers himself thought Too Late Blues was “self-indulgent,” and his own independent films as director (a short, The Kiss, and two features, Run Across the River and The Lollipop Cover) received little attention.  The cinema’s loss was television’s gain, as Chambers became the primary non-writing producer of a succession of smart, well-made series: Johnny Staccato, Target: The Corrupters, The Lloyd Bridges Show, Peyton Place, and Columbo, not to mention an infamous unsold pilot (Calhoun: County Agent, the subject of writer Merle Miller’s mocking, juicy book Only You, Dick Daring) and a number of worthy made-for-television movies.

In a 2005 telephone interview, Chambers shared some candid and often very funny memories from his four-year stint as the producer of Peyton Place.

Tell me about your transition from in front of the camera to behind it.

I started first as an actor in New York in live television, and then I worked on Broadway, Off-Broadway.  I wanted to be a director; I didn’t want to be an actor.  But when I got out of drama school I looked like I was twelve years old, and I played twelve years old until I was about twenty-two.  Eventually I went to work as a casting director, first as an assistant to Fred Coe’s casting director on Philco Playhouse [and] Mister Peepers.  I worked there with Paddy Chayefsky and Delbert Mann and Arthur Penn and Tad Mosel – all these people who were working on Philco Playhouse.  Fred Coe was the premiere live television producer at the time.

I came out from New York.  John Cassavetes did that, brought me out to produce Johnny Staccato.  Forced me onto Revue/MCA, and they did it.  I stayed with that for the year, and then I stayed in California and got a divorce.  Why not?  I did other things, and then Paul Monash called me a couple of times.  He called me before Felix Feist [the second producer of Peyton Place], and didn’t hire me, and then when Feist died, he did.

What you did on Peyton Place, relative to Paul Monash and the other members of the production staff?

First of all, I’m doing all of the casting, all the hiring of the actors.  Most of the time we had the same revolving directors, but from time to time I would change them.  I cut all of the pictures with the editors, and we did three of them a week most of the time.  When we cut to [broadcasting] two a week, I still convinced them to shoot three, so that we could all get some time off.

Did you institute any major changes when you first came in on the show?

Well, there were some rocky things.  The sound quality of the show wasn’t very good.  It was cut, I think, very slow.  The style in which it was shot, which was a lot of camera movement up and down and sideways, and a lot of dolly shots and masters of maybe five, six, seven, eight, ten pages.  On the stages at Fox, which were very old, that was noisy.  They put up with it by bringing the people back and having them loop the lines, which to me was very expensive.  So I integrated new carpets on all the sets to kill the sound.  And started using radio mics, which they hadn’t used before, and instituted a lot of lighter weight modern equipment, because we were all using this antiquated equipment that was there as part of the facilities of Twentieth Century-Fox.  They didn’t want to buy new lighting equipment and stuff, but eventually we did.  Then we went from black and white to color, and we segued.  Every week, as we were getting to know when we were going to broadcast in color, I would change three or four sets, until we had them all in color.  All of that was part of my responsibility.  

Paul was also making movies and making a couple of other pilots and shows.  That’s why eventually, when [writing producer] Dick DeRoy left and [story editor] Del Reisman moved up, instead of bringing somebody in he said, “You do it.”  So I went down and I plotted it out with them and worked on that.  I didn’t do any of the writing; I just plotted.

When you came in, was there a sense that Mia Farrow was the breakout star of the show?

Mia was probably the most popular one on the show, next to then Ryan [O’Neal] and then Rita, who was played by Pat Morrow, and then the other guy, the brother [Christopher Connelly].  Wherever they would go, they were mobbed.

Did the network, or Monash, direct you to place a greater emphasis on the younger characters?

No.

Who were some of the actors you cast personally in the show?

Well, I was watching The Long Hot Summer when I saw this gorgeous Lana Wood.  We had a Christmas party, and she was dancing, and holy shit, look at that!  So I manipulated them getting a part for her.  I can’t remember how that all happened, but I got her in there.  Then there was also this – Myrna Fahey, I thought she was gorgeous.  I thought she looked like Elizabeth Taylor.  I got her in there in a part, and I used her a few times later.  I thought both of them would be bigger than they were.  Stephen Oliver, I found in an interview.  I brought in Leigh Taylor-Young.  I found her.  Then she and Ryan started messing around, and he knocked her up.  He was married to Joanna Moore.  That was a problem to work out.  When Mia left, we had a number of different women come in to kind of replace [her]: Joyce Jillson, Tippy Walker.  Leigh Taylor-Young was the most interesting one.

Leslie Nielsen came in for a while and played a double part.  Susan Oliver came in.  I don’t know if you know who Don Gordon [the star and co-writer of Chambers’s 1965 film The Lollipop Cover] is, but he came in for a while.  Then of course Lee Grant, and there was John Kellogg.  He was a character actor, a bad guy from the thirties and forties.  Dan Duryea, we brought in for a while.  Generally, we didn’t lock them in.  Gena Rowlands I had to lock in, because she only wanted to work until so-and-so, and then I said, “Okay, you’ll just do this amount of episodes and then out.”  Some of them were just [bit players] – Richard Dreyfuss used to play the newspaper boy!  There was a black policeman, Sergeant Walker: Morris Buchanan.  And then there was a guy that ran the lobster thing on the pier, Frankie London.

Ah, now I’m seeing a pattern – not just Gena Rowlands but Buchanan and London were all actors who had worked often with Cassavetes, as you had.

Yeah, Frank was one of John’s.  He was in Too Late Blues, as I was.  

To what extent did Paul Monash give you a free hand in producing Peyton Place?

Generally, as he had confidence in me, after about six months, then he just let me alone.  You didn’t need to run any casting [by him], except major people like Gena or when Susan Oliver came in.  [For those roles] I would tell him who I would like.

Did you have much to do with the network?

No, I did not have much to do with the network.  At that time the guy responsible for us was Tony Barr.  I talked to him every week.  He would want to know what’s going on – who’s this, what’s that.  And we would clear things with him.  We were so much in advance – we were ten weeks, probably, filmed in advance.  So that means our material was even more weeks [ahead] than that.  So they knew where we were going way ahead of airtime.  If there was any red flags, we would get them early.  But it was too successful to have much problem.  In those days, there weren’t as many people muddling in everything.  I’ve been on flops where they’d beat your head in every day.  On Johnny Staccato, Lew Wasserman wanted a forty share.  We couldn’t get there, so he was on my neck all the time.

Whereas on Peyton Place….

It was already in there!  I mean, in the summertime, we were one, two, and three [in the ratings].  So you don’t mess around with success too much.  Now, they meddle in everything, even if you’re successful.

Was it a good experience for you?

It was terrific!  From my background, it wasn’t the most exciting kind of drama.  About the sixth or seventh month of working on the show, I came out of the dailies one day and say, “Well, that was a pretty good show.  That was pretty good stuff I saw there today.”  I says, “Uh-oh.  I’m in trouble!”  I mean, I had just come from Fred Coe, with Paddy Chayefsky and Delbert Mann.  You have a sense of value and quality that’s a little different.  But you learn to adjust: hey, wait a minute, it’s a soap opera.  It’s television.  You do the best you can.  And that I did, then, for the rest of my career.  I would do the best I could with what I had.

Tell me about how the writing staff functioned.

They had a deal with the Writers Guild that was complicated.  They had about nine writers, right?  How did they get credit?  So what they did is that we would plot these things out, and Nina [Laemmle] would alternate with Del [Reisman], writing up the plot.  Nina would do one act and Del would do the other act.  Then they would give that outline to a writer, whoever it was.  They would write it.  Doesn’t mean that they got the credit on that episode.  Just everybody got credits, but they didn’t always write what was there.  Sometimes somebody’s name would be on something that somebody else wrote.  But I would know who wrote what.  And I was most impressed by – Carol Sobieski was very good, but Lee [Lionel E.] Siegel was the best of all of them.

What do you remember about Peyton Place’s directors?

Ted Post was my first directing teacher, back in New York.  He and Walter Doniger had the same technique.  Walter was much more rigid than Ted.  Ted was the kind of director, no matter what it was, you said, “We’ve got this thing we’ve got to shoot here, these twelve pages over here, Teddy….”

“Well, I haven’t read ’em….”

“Well, it starts over here….”

“Okay, thank you!”  And he just goes and does it.  He could do anything.

I really admired the long takes and elaborate compositions in Doniger’s episodes.

Well, that wasn’t Walter’s style.  It was the style of the show.  Teddy Post shot that way.  It was actually a live television look.  If you went back to the soaps and things of live television, they had a lot of movement in a single camera.  And that became part of the style, mixed, of course, with the film technique.  So we had a lot of movement.  Sometimes 23 or 24 or 25 moves in one scene.  They would be in a two-shot, move to a close-up, move to an over-the-shoulder.  Not the actors, the camera is doing it.

I’m getting the sense that you were not a big admirer of Walter Doniger.

Walter knew nothing about acting.  He would say to the actors one thing: “Don’t do anything!  Don’t do anything!  Don’t feel anything, don’t do anything.”  That was his direction.  Teddy was more Method-oriented.

I have a Walter Doniger story you may not like, but….  Walter was a very rigid control freak.  I had talked Gena Rowlands into coming in to play a part for ninety episodes.  She would come in in episode so-and-so and ninety episodes later she would leave, because she was [at] the beginning of a movie career.  But I happened to know John needed the money to finish one of his pictures [Faces, 1968].  I knew her from New York, before, with John.

Anyway, her first day happens to be with Walter Doniger.  Now, I have had my problems with Walter Doniger from time to time, when I would ask him to do something specifically and he wouldn’t do it.  It would annoy me, but I wouldn’t come down on him.  I would get annoyed and the next time something would happen I would bring it up, but he would do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.  It wasn’t that big a deal, but this became a big deal.  

Gena’s first day.  Now she’s a friend of mine, right?  It’s about a six, seven, eight-page scene.  So they start shooting it.  I’m not there; I’m in the office.  Somewhere, Gena goes up.  Now, she wasn’t used to doing seven or eight page masters.  She was used to doing a piece of a master and then maybe some coverage, then another piece of a master.  But she wasn’t used to doing seven, eight, nine moves, ten moves, fifteen.  It was a whole new technique and she was just starting, right?  So she did it and stopped.  Then he started all over again.  And then did it again, stopped.  Maybe they did that three or four times, and then finally she said, “Couldn’t you just print and pick up?”

He said, “Who’s the director, you or me?”  

She says, “Oh, okay.”  She said, “Excuse me, I have to go to my dressing room.”  

She went to her dressing room and called me.  Now, Gena is a lady.  She is the daughter of a state senator.  Her mother is elegant.  You don’t swear in front of Gena, right?  She got on the phone and she said, “Everett, I’ve got to talk to you right now about this prick, Walter Doniger.”

Oh.

She said, “I’ll be in my dressing room.  Come.  And my agent is coming, and my press agent is coming.”

So I went in to Paul and I said, “Paul, we’ve got a small problem.”  

He said, “Go down and talk to her.”  

So eventually what happened is that I went up to the set and said, “Walter, you’ve got to go down there and eat some crow.  Because she’s going home.”  I think we called him up to the office, as I recall, because Walter and Paul and I were [all talking].  

So I took him down to Gena and took her into the dressing room, and by then her agent, Jack Gilardi, had arrived.  They went in, and [Gilardi] and I went out to the end of the corridor and sat down on the steps and we heard Gena ream … his … ass.  “You son of a bitch, you no-good fuck, you….”  [Laughs]  She really worked him over the coals.  Then, when that was done, he ate some crow, and she went back on the set and finished.  

But Walter Doniger and I didn’t cut it from then on, and I replaced him.  

Really?  Is it accurate to say that you fired him?

When you replace somebody that’s been with a show for about three years, I would think so.

When I interviewed him, Doniger made it sound like he’d left of his own volition.

No, he did not.  When his option or whatever it was came up, I told Paul I don’t want to work with him any more.  Because that was just one incident on top of these other little ones.

One other thing about Walter Doniger: every day he sent his dailies to Dick Zanuck’s screening room, hoping that Zanuck would like the dailies and give him a movie.

Some of the other actors on the show found Walter charming, though.

Well, he could be that too.  It’s just that when you’re a control freak, and I’m a control freak, something’s gotta give.  Who’s gonna run the show, is what that comes down to.  And it was kind of a battle from time to time about who was.  A dear friend of mine is Jeffrey Hayden, and we had the same problem.  It was about wardrobe with Barbara Parkins.  We had decided what we wanted her to wear and he changed it.  I had it [with Hayden] on The Lloyd Bridges Show, also; it was something to do with [guest star] Diane Baker.

So you hired Jeff Hayden after having worked with him on that series.

I did indeed.  John Newland was the third director when I came on, and I looked at a couple of his shows and I thought they were shitty.  I knew John, also, from New York, so I went down on the set and I said, “John, could you and I have a conversation please?” 

He says, “This is all crap!  The show is crap!  Everything about it is crap!  Don’t talk to me about it, it’s crap.”  

“John, that’s a bad attitude.  I want your best.  If you can’t do your best, you can’t do it.”  

He said, “Then I don’t do it!”  

So he left and Jeff came in.

I’ve talked to some talented people from Peyton Place (like Franklin Barton, one of the original writers) who looked down on it.  They just couldn’t wrap their minds around doing a soap opera.

All television is soap opera.  We’ve tried to make it look like something else, but it isn’t.

Who were you closest to among the cast?

Well, I hung out a lot with Ryan.  And there was a guy, William Allyn, who was the associate producer.  He and I knew each other; he was an actor in New York.  He and I and Ryan would go to lunch a lot.  And Ryan is very funny.  We really had a lot of laughs with him.  After he got out and started making movies, I ran into him once and it was like he didn’t know me.

Were there others among the actors with whom you didn’t get along?

I did have some run-ins with Barbara Parkins.  Her agent, and I can’t think of his name now, they were very pissy.  She and Lee Grant were both nominated for an Emmy, and the Emmy committee called and said, “Would you pick a film for them to show to the Actors’ [Branch], so they could vote for them.”  You know, you send material over, the actors look at the material, and then they vote.  So I picked an episode that both of them had real good stuff in.  Then one day I get a call from her agent and he said, “We want to sit down with Barbara and pick out material.”  

I said, “Well, you can’t, because it’s gone.  It was three weeks ago they asked for it.”

“What do you mean, they asked for it?”

“Well, they asked for it.  I sent the material.”  

Well, she had a fit.  She didn’t speak to me until I was working on Columbo, and she was over there on some movie of the week or something.

She really didn’t speak to you again during the entire run of Peyton Place?

She didn’t speak to me for at least two years.  Well, I directed some [episodes], so she had to talk to me at that time.

One other thing was: Dorothy Malone was never on time.  Never.  Never did her hair.  She would come in and not have her roots done, and we’d have to stop and fix her roots and do her hair.  And one of the stand-ins was her spy.  If she had an eight o’clock call, or a ten o’clock call, he would see where they were and call her: “Don’t worry, they’re not going to get to you till eleven.”  And so she wouldn’t come in.  And then she got sick and I replaced her for a while with Lola Albright, and Mr. Peyton got sick, George Macready, and I replaced him for a while with Wilfrid Hyde-White.

Macready was terrific in that part.

Yeah, he was terrific.  And he was never one of my favorite actors, but I really liked him [on Peyton Place].

Peyton Place went through some interesting changes during its last year on the air.

We were [on] during the Vietnam War, but we were in limbo, never-never-land, in terms of reality.  The war was never spoken of.  And in the fifth year, [the ratings] may have been weakening a little bit, so Paul and I had a meeting and decided to get into something more contemporary.  He came back and wanted to introduce a black family.  I said, “Okay, if we do that, are we going to introduce the war, are we going to introduce rock and roll, something more contemporary with the kids?”

“Yes.”  

So we started to make a transition.  Paul put out a press release about the black family coming in, with a son who’s in love with a white girl.  Hate mail came.  This is 1968, right?  Hate mail.  One letter I got said that if you have this black boy with this white girl, I will nail you up to my garage door.  And I was very uncomfortable with that myself.  I said to Paul, “Let us get a black sociologist or psychologist, or somebody, to advise us.”  Because we were totally lily-white.  Everybody on the show was lily-white.  We cast Ruby Dee and Percy Rodriguez and Glynn Turman and another girl [Judy Pace].

Did you keep the interracial relationship angle?

Absolutely not.  First of all, I knew Ruby Dee and her husband [Ossie Davis] from New York, and when she got the job both of them came out and wanted to talk about where we were going.  Both of them were very oriented in not making it look bad, not making the black family look ridiculous.  It was ridiculous enough that we made him a brain surgeon, [of] which there were only nine in the United States!  Nine black neurosurgeons at the time.  We had an interview with one of them, who came to talk to us.  Anyway, eventually, I was able to stop the black-white [interracial romance] thing, bring in a doctor of psychology, get a couple of black writers.  We had rap sessions every week with the writers about what could be done with the black family to keep it from being distasteful and [depicted as] white fantasies, which is what it would have been if we’d have continued it without that kind of help.

It seems like the look of the show got a little more contemporary — more “mod,” so to speak — in the final year.

Yes, it did.  We put in a disco.  We had a rock and roll band in the disco, called The Pillory.  Jerry Moss at A&M Records was a friend of mine, so I said, “Can you put together a group for me?”  So he sent over a bunch of groups and we auditioned them.  One of them was The Carpenters.  And I said no, I cannot see a rock and roll band with a female drummer.  Needless to say….  Anyway, we put together an ad hoc band and they would do all the music, and then we’d just send it over and do it to playback.

Did you get to know Paul Monash well personally?

Yeah, sure.  I mean, I spent four years with him.  He was a strange, mercurial man.  He was very ego-oriented.  When I came in there, I was working at the time at a place called International Productions, with Robert Brandt, who was Janet Leigh’s husband.  When I left, he just dissolved the company.  We had a PR firm working with us, and I said, “Well, we have this commitment and I’ll take it with me.”  

I called Paul, because I knew he was PR-oriented.  You always saw his name [in the press] about whatever happened on Peyton Place.  He got his name there first.  I said, “Is it all right if I use [a publicist]?”  

He says, “It’s okay.  I’ve gotten all the publicity I need.”  

Right?  And then when he starts seeing my name casting so-and-so, and my name doing this, he got pissed.  In fact, they did a special with him moderating it about Peyton Place.  He never mentioned anybody but him.  Not one of the directors.  Not one of the producers.  Nothing.  It was all him.  So, knowing that, and having worked with Aaron Spelling, who was the same kind of PR-oriented person, you don’t infringe.  You just stay cool.

Did you think Monash was talented?

Oh, he was the best writer on the show.  The best.  He also was a good director.  He did one episode.  He would rewrite stuff, and write stuff, yeah.  He never took any credit for it.  He would just do it.  Once in a while they would get stuck and he would do something.

Someone else who worked for him intimated that Monash would avail himself of the casting couch.

Oh, he was fucking everything that walked.  Everything.  Truck drivers, if they were female – anything.  He was just terrible.  One of my friends I got on there as a secretary, and they used our beach house once.  She said, “He’s like a rabbit.”  You know, Fox has another gate on the west side of the lot.  It was a temporary gate, but mostly it was a set.  He had an apartment over there, right across the street.

I guess that wasn’t uncommon at that time.

I guess, but it was like a cliche.  He was, in his own way, very insecure.  He had, I believe, a very dominant father, who never gave him any recognition.  He was a little driven by that.  And he was married to this one woman when we were doing that show, then later he married a writer, Merrit Malloy, who had one hand.  Lee Philips, who was in the original Peyton Place [movie], was also a buddy of mine; I had brought him in in the later years as one of the directors.  Then Paul was making movies at CBS, and he gave Merrit some of these movies to write or something, and then Lee became one of the directors.  Lee and Merrit became an item, and Lee’s wife found out and she threw him out.  They got a divorce.  He came and stayed with me, because I was single at the time.  It was a mess.  And Paul found about it – he was chasing all over town looking for Lee Philips.

I think the photography on Peyton Place is gorgeous, and I neglected to ask you about the cinematographer, Robert Hauser.

Yeah, he was a wonderful cameraman.  Bill Cronjager was the operator.  After Bob Hauser left, I made him the cameraman.  And he worked with me also on Columbo, and Partners in Crime.  We shot it in San Francisco, with Loni Anderson and Lynda Carter.  I used to call the show Cagney and Cleavage.  It was a terrible show.

It seems like people of your generation had fewer opportunities to do meaningful work in the seventies and eighties than in the years before.

It started to flatten out a bit.  It got so controlled by the networks that I quit and moved back to New York in 1980, for four years.  I couldn’t take one more meeting with one more twenty-four year-old Wharton School of Business executive telling me how you do drama.  Now it’s worse.

Above: Everett Chambers in Too Late Blues (1961).

Everybody Loved Ed Lauter

The news of Ed Lauter’s death on Wednesday came as a shock, not so much because he was terribly young — Lauter was 74 — but because he’d looked about the same for the whole of his forty-year career, and often (especially in recent years) played characters much younger than his actual age.  Tall, sharp-chinned, and prematurely bald, Lauter sketched in a lot of thankless authority figures (as a fire chief, for instance, in several episodes of ER) but acquired a cult following through juicier turns as a gamut of bad guys, from the coolly sinister to the outright terrifying.  Lauter died of mesothelioma, a form of cancer, but he remained active until the end, logging a recurring role on Shameless this year and completing several features scheduled for release in 2014.  It seemed like we’d have him forever.

I met Lauter in January 2011, when I sat in on part of his interview with director-producer Tom Donahue for the documentary Casting By.  Lauter appears in the film just briefly, to relate a memorable anecdote about his first meeting with Marion Dougherty (a story that always gets a big laugh at screenings). But Tom questioned Lauter at length, covering much of his early life and career, and even solicited the skilled mimic’s impressions of James Cagney, Burt Lancaster, and John Wayne.  Lauter, it turned out, was an admirer and amateur historian of classical Hollywood acting, as eager to relate a second-hand story about one of his performing heroes as an anecdote from his own experience.

Lauter:  One of my favorite actors, Montgomery Clift, does The Search and he turns around and at the end of the movie is looking at this woman who finally found her kid after all these years, and he does three emotions at once, in one look . . . . I heard that Alan Ladd was in the commissary one day and they said, “Alan, how’s it going today?”  And he says, “Today I made a great look.”  Sometimes a great look sells everything.

Like most of the rest of the internet, it seems, Tom and I are big fans of Lauter’s, both as an actor and an all-around nice guy.  We wanted to share some of Lauter’s remarks that landed on the proverbial cutting room floor, and so Tom has graciously allowed me to use his interview for background and to quote from it at length here.

*

Like Judy Garland, Lauter was born in a trunk: His mother, Sally Lee, spent four years as a Broadway actress.  She gave it up to raise Ed and his two sisters (largely as a single parent), but Ed caught the acting bug from her stories of working for or alongside the likes of David Belasco and the Shuberts, Al Jolson and Fred Astaire.

Before he was a movie star Lauter was something of a basketball star, first at his high school in Long Beach, Long Island, and then (from 1957 to 1960) at LIU’s C.W. Post Campus.  After graduation, Lauter moved to Manhattan to begin what would be a decade-long struggle to establish himself as a performer.  He studied, briefly, with the great character actor William Hickey.

Lauter: A lot of acting teachers can be a little hard on actors and Bill was the complete opposite.  He nurtured us.  He would always say listen.  Listening is very important for an actor.  Grant Mitchell was one of the great listeners.  He was an old character actor.  Spencer Tracy was a young actor and George M. Cohan says, “We’re going to go to a play tonight; we’re going to watch Grant Mitchell.”  He says “Grant who?”  “Grant Mitchell.”  He says, “Why are we going to watch him?”  “Because he listens in scenes.  Watch him listen in a scene.”   If you ever watch an old movie you’ll see Grant Mitchell, he’s great.  He’s like George C. Scott does an Anatomy of A Murder, with Jimmy Stewart.  A lot of times George has got to listen to Jimmy Stewart and you can hear, you can hear George listening.

In 1964 he married one Future Fulton (real name: Wanda Mae), an actress and singer who was nearly twenty years his senior.  Future guided his career during Lauter’s lean days, but died of cancer just as he began to enjoy some success.  Lauter chased  stage and TV roles during this period and even played some stand-up gigs.  He made his earliest appearances on camera in TV commercials, for cigarettes and TWA (two things they don’t make commercials for any more).

Lauter: Future was kind of like my guru.  She taught me.  She had a five-year scholarship to the Actors Studio, so she gave me all that information that she picked up.  I met people like Jason Robards through her.  And finally we were about down to fifty dollars and I got a commercial for Bayer Aspirin and, hallelullah, out of that commercial they made four commercials.  They made one one minute, two thirty seconds, and one fifteen second [commercial] that they would play.  I remember the time the first royalty check came in and I said Future, it wasn’t that much – a couple hundred dollars.  She went nuts: “Whoa!”  And every few weeks this check would come in, and that was great, and then we’d go to shows.

Lauter’s breakthrough came when he was cast in several small roles in the 1968 Broadway production of The Great White Hope.  When he interviewed for the job, Lauter fielded more questions about his athletic background than his acting skills; the director, Ed Sherin, was putting together a baseball team for the Broadway Show League and wanted to win.

Lauter: When I was doing The Great White Hope, I understudied a lot bigger part and I got a chance to play it for three weeks.  One night I went out there, my scene was with Jane Alexander and I was out there, just Jane and I alone on the stage, and I did the scene and I came off and I don’t even remember doing it because I was in such a freaking zone, you know?  And it’s like magic.

In Casting By, Lauter describes the clever ploy he used to infiltrate the office of Marion Dougherty, then the top casting director in New York.  Dressed in his security guard’s costume from The Great White Hope, Lauter impersonated a postman with a special delivery letter for Dougherty; and although the gimmick went awry, the tale was passed down by Dougherty’s assistants and became a minor Hollywood legend.  It wasn’t the only trick Lauter used to get casting directors’ attention.

Lauter: Another time I heard that Peter Sellers had impersonated some famous actor’s voice and got a job for himself.  I said, that’s a good way to do it.  So I picked up the phone one day and I called Buzz Berger, who was one of the casting directors for Trials of O’Brien, the Peter Falk thing.  He picks up the phone and I said I was George C. Scott.  He says, “Oh, hello, George.”  “Buzz, hey Buzz, how are ya?  Listen Buzz, I went down to see an actor and that guy’s name is Ed Lauter.  I want you to take a look at him.  I think he’s going to be good!”

Although Dougherty would eventually use him in the excellent The Last American Hero, it was another important casting director, Lynn Stalmaster, who launched Lauter’s film career.  Trading on his connection to Edwin Sherin, Lauter talked his way into a reading for Sherin’s debut feature, Valdez Is Coming, with his eye on the small role of the “bony man.”  He didn’t get the part (it went to the forgotten James Lemp), but Lauter made an impression on Stalmaster, who was the film’s casting director.

Lauter: Lynn used to be an actor, so he knows what it’s like.  He did a couple of movies.  So he has empathy.  Some casting directors are a little – they want to be actors, they’re jealous of actors.  Lynn really likes actors.

Stalmaster encouraged Lauter to come to Los Angeles and quickly cast him in a cluster of high-profile films, all of them released in 1972: Dirty Little Billy, The New Centurions, Hickey & Boggs, and The Magnificent Seven Ride.  Lauter became one of the key faces of the New Hollywood, appearing in a dozen or so of the best American films of the seventies.  Alfred Hitchcock saw him in Robert Aldrich’s The Longest Yard and became fixated on Lauter with some of the intensity he usually reserved for icy blondes.  Hitch featured him in a key role in Family Plot and penciled Lauter in for the third lead in his next film, The Short Night, opposite Sean Connery and Liv Ullmann.  But Hitchcock’s failing health compelled the cancellation of that project, which might have elevated Lauter above the familiar-face plateau where he would remain for the rest of his career.

Lauter: I’ll tell you one thing that Hitchcock said that [I think of] when I’m out of work and I’m walking around and feeling [down].  His secretary, Peggy Robertson, said after we worked [together] that he said to Peggy that I was the best character actor that he ever worked with.  I said, “Peggy, run that by me again.”  “Best character actor he ever worked with.”  Wow, man.

For more essential Lauter reading, check out Chuck Stephens’s appreciation from Film Comment and Anthony Petkovich’s Shock Cinema interview.

Top: Ed Lauter on Hawaii Five-O (“The Golden Noose,” 1980). Above: An early headshot, probably from the mid-1960s (courtesy Ed Lauter).