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.

Who Are Those Guys #10

I promised I’d be back with more Ben Casey coverage after a few detours.  First up, then, is your Ben Casey edition of Who Are Those Guys, highlighting some uncredited bit players I noticed in the episodes I revisited for my A.V. Club piece on the show and this thing about Vince Edwards.

“A Bird in the Solitude Singing” (September 21, 1964), the amazing episode with Anne Francis as the disfigured hooker, covers most of the cast in its credits.  But here’s one familiar-looking fellow who puts in a brief appearance, sans credit, as a barfly who gives Dr. Casey the evil eye after Casey cockblocks his move on the lovely Anne.

Next we have “Three L’il Lambs” (March 29, 1965), the possibly-a-backdoor-pilot-but-I’m-not-completely-sure-about-that episode where Casey shepherds a trio of green interns.  There’s a long nightclub scene where the three lads squire their dates: Norman Alden gets Kathy Kersh (lucky guy), William Arvin (whatever happened to him?) lands Marlo Thomas (er…), and somehow Nick Adams (on the left below) ends up with only a bit actress who has one line.

I didn’t have room to wedge “Journeys End in Lovers Meeting” (April 19, 1965) into the A.V. Club article, but this episode by one of the show’s few female writers, Pat Fielder, is a wonderfully operatic tearjerker with Red Buttons as a nice teacher whose young wife (Antoinette Bower) suffers horribly from a fatal brain tumor.  Here are a couple of students in Buttons’s class.  They even get names: the smirky guy is “Buddy” and the girl with the massive beehive (hornet’s nest? wedding cake? roll of fencewire borrowed from the western on the next soundstage? I could do this all day) is “Karen.”  But no love for either in the end credits, alas.  Karen in particular looks maddeningly familiar.

Finally, here’s a shot from Vince-as-director’s biggest turkey, “Run For Your Lives, Dr. Galanos Practices Here” (October 4, 1965). (Great title, at least.)  This guy in the center is a patient who, like so many of us, is not happy about missing his favorite program because the hospital’s TV room has been taken over by Latin American revolutionaries.  The other two old guys on either side of him are extras who do not have lines, although I’m fairly certain that the gent on the left is Charles P. Thompson of The Andy Griffith Show fame.

All right, you know the drill.  Tell me who these people are, please.

Who Are Those Guys #9

You all did so well on the last one – let’s cue up another round of unbilled bit players!

Aaron Spelling’s Vega$ is a frustrating show in this regard.  Every episode is top-heavy with name actors, many of them just popping in for cameos.  It’s a Spelling formula that dates back to Burke’s Law, but here it’s coupled with an inattentiveness for the lesser-known bit players that almost seems status-based — as if giving those peons billing would somehow diminish the celebs who adorned the opening titles.

Here are two uncredited actors who appear in the 1978 pilot (written by Michael Mann, but not so’s you’d know).  The first is – well, as in many a Spelling script, it’s not entirely clear who the fellow with the large pouf of gray hair is, but he turns up in one early scene to deliver some exposition to Robert Urich.  The second (on the far left) is a state trooper who has some bad news about Urich’s car.  This is the best look you get at him.

The series was shot entirely in Las Vegas, so it’s possible these guys are local actors who didn’t do much else on film. But they look awfully familiar, so let’s give this a whirl.

Who Are Those Guys #8

Let us speak now of the Universal Show Reporter Scene.

Here’s a stock scene you’ve watched a thousand times: A big muckety-muck of some sort, usually the toplining guest star of the week, makes a big entrance by, well, making an entrance. Surrounded by an entourage, he or she pushes through a throng of reporters, stopping long enough to field exactly the questions needed to set up the plot.

Of course, lots of shows did versions of this scene, but I seem to associate them mostly with Universal series of the late sixties and early seventies: The Name of the Game, The Bold Ones, Columbo. Apart from the expository value, the reporter scene was a chance to toss a paycheck to a few actors who could use the bread, or a timely credit to continue their insurance eligibility through the Screen Actors Guild. Heck, Regis J. Cordic and Stuart Nisbet probably made half their annual income thrusting plastic microphones into the stars’ faces in those days.

The catch, of course, was that if an episode had a big cast, these one-line pseudo-journalists were the first ones lopped off the end credit roll. This weekend, for instance, I watched the TV movies that launched The Six Million Dollar Man. In the third one, “The Solid Gold Kidnapping,” government official Leif Erickson gets quizzed by a pair of sweaty-looking newshounds, both played by uncredited actors. Recognize either of them? (In the first image, only the fellow on the right has a speaking part; the other guy is an extra.)

I’m pretty sure the first actor is Stacy Keach, Sr., but I’d like to hear that one seconded (or not). And I have no idea about portly Reporter #2.

And one more or the road: Here’s a frame from an early episode of Laramie, “The Star Trail.” This older gent on the horse has one moving and fairly lengthy scene, playing the father of a baddie (William Bryant) that guest star Lloyd Nolan has just gunned down. But he, along with several other actors (including the reliable Oliver McGowan, playing a bank president) didn’t make the credits. Anyone recognize him?

Who Are Those Guys #7

Wagon Train continues to serve as my go-to comfort food whenever I have the sniffles and don’t feel up to watching something that might be, y’know, good.  Over the holidays, I plowed through a middle chunk of the third season, which yielded such mild discoveries / pleasures as a twenty-five year old Louise Fletcher (as Estella in “The Tom Tuckett Story,” a credited adaptation of Great Expectations!) and Elisha Cook, Jr., as a dangerous trail weasel named Cadge Waldo (in “The Tracy Sadler Story”).  If you’re going to name a character “Cadge Waldo,” you pretty much have to get Elisha Cook to play him.  Leonard Nimoy as a drunken Indian and Susan Oliver, loudly proclaiming that her name is Margaret Hamilton (which is hilarious if you know your character actresses), as a spoiled teenager in “The Maggie Hamilton Story.”  “Look at that beautiful rabbit!” Susan exclaims dimly, and Flint (Robert Horton) blows it away for dinner.

Minor pleasures amid hazy naps.

The way Revue Productions did its screen credits around this time (1959-1960) was procrustean.  Most shows had one or two end credit cards for the guest stars, and if everyone fit, they got screen credit; if not, they didn’t.  A Wagon Train episode with few guest stars had room in the credits for all of them, including bit players and even stuntmen.  In an episode with a large cast, however, actors with major secondary roles might get left out.  If a top-lining guest star required extra-large type or single card billing, that would further serve to crowd out some of the supporting actors.  Nobody really cared whether the actors received credit or not – which leaves fussy historians, fifty-odd years later, waiting for each set of end titles with fingers crossed.

The 1959 Christmas episode, “The St. Nicholas Story,” sees the train’s Santa Claus arrow-speared by unfriendly Indians.  Missing children from both sides find each other on the plains and frolic together, thus brokering an uneasy truce.  And Ward Bond saves Christmas.  Somehow, it’s less nauseating than it sounds, but amidst the chaos the actress playing the Indian boy’s mother went uncredited:

“The Lita Foladaire Story” is a rare off-campus episode for trailmaster Major Adams, who solves a frontier-town murder mystery with the help of sidekicks Bill Hawks and Charlie Wooster.  Too many suspects for the end credits; left out are the sheriff (top, on the right with Ward Bond) and one “Jason Arnold,” attorney at law, who pops in briefly to deliver a bit of exposition (bottom, also on the right with Bond; shall we say that director Jerry Hopper’s sense of composition was, er, consistent):

Then in “The Christine Elliott Story,” the title character (Phyllis Thaxter) shepherds a dozen mischievous boys onto the wagon train once her father drops dead and his orphanage closes.  This one is about as nauseating as it sounds.  Oddly, while seven of the twelve child actors receive screen credit, the elderly fellow playing Thaxter’s father, “John Russell,” does not, even though he has a lengthy deathbed scene:

So can anyone ID these uncredited Wagon Trainers?  As it happens, all three of these episodes are on Youtube in their entirety.  For “The St. Nicholas Story,” see 26:50; for “The Lita Foladaire Story,” see 01:45 and 30:00; for “The Christine Elliott Story,” see 02:50.  But don’t watch Wagon Train on Youtube for pleasure; these copies are way too compressed.  Spring for the DVDs.)

P.S. Bonus screed against the IMDb et. al.: Look around the internet and you’ll see the titles of many Wagon Train episodes, most of which incorporate the names of the primary guest characters, misspelled on many data aggregation sites.  As the screen grab below makes clear, it’s Elliott with two T’s, and yet it’s spelled as “Elliot” on IMDb.com, tvguide.com, starz.com, tvrage.com, tviv.org, zap2it.com, and even most of the Youtube accounts that have posted the video illegally.  “The Vittorio Botticelli Story,” also from the third season, is often garbled as “The Vittorio Bottecelli Story.”  Yet another reason why I still transcribe the credits of most vintage TV episodes that I watch, even though the internet has made some of that work (but not every detail of it) redundant.

Obituary: Morgan Jones (1927?-2012)

Actor Morgan Jones died on January 13 at the age of 84.  Jones logged more than a hundred appearances on television and in a few films from the early fifties through the mid-eighties.  Like many dozens of actors, he capped his career with a Murder, She Wrote role.  Jones looked older than he was, so you probably thought he’d died long ago.

Some of the obituaries will call him a character actor, but I don’t think that’s quite right; that term should be reserved for actors who had meaty, attention-getting parts in most of the things they did.  Jones, on the other hand, was emblematic of a different tier of actors – the familiar, comforting faces who didn’t get cast as characters with backstories or inner lives, but as narrative avatars who delivered exposition and moved the plot along.  Jones specialized in bland authority figures, military men or police officers, along with the occasional reporter or blue-collar working man.  The hierarchy is important here: if Jones played a cop, odds are he was the number-two detective, the one who stood in the background with a notepad and answered questions from the better-known actor playing the other detective.

Back, and to the left: Jones (with Arthur Franz) on The Invaders (“The Life Seekers,” 1968).

It should come as no surprise that Jones played federal agents in some Quinn Martin shows (The F.B.I. and O’Hara, U.S. Treasury).  He was also a regular on something called The Blue Angels (as a Navy officer), and a semi-regular on Highway Patrol (as a cop); The Rat Patrol (as an Army captain); The Young Rebels (demoted to a sergeant); and, extending his range to the max, as an Intertect researcher-cum-computer technician during the first season of Mannix.

I hope none of the above sounds condescending, because actors like Morgan Jones are favorites of television aficionados.  They perform a specific and rather hard-to-describe role in creating an alternate televisual reality across different shows, different genres, multiple decades.  When Jones’s solid frame and slightly beefy, slightly squinty face appeared on the screen, it announced a certain subliminal meaning: a piece of information was about to be conveyed, or a villain momentarily impeded.  Some of that came through Jones’s physique, or the various uniforms he often wore; but if you watched a lot of television, the idea came across even more clearly just through the frisson of recognition.

Finally, the usual refrain: Jones was on the list.  I would have loved to have interviewed him for this blog, but never got around to making the call.  Faster, I must move faster.

Eight Million Stories in the NAKED CITY … Many of Them Uncredited (Part 2)

In my last post, I began a tour of the unbilled actors who lurked on the streets of the sixties crime drama Naked City.  Many of whom later went on to become major stars, or at least busy character actors.  Now, with the help of the production records on file in the archives of Naked City’s executive producer Herbert B. Leonard, we can identify most of these uncredited performers.

For some reason, Naked City’s third season yields the best crop of soon-to-be-famous bit players.  Maybe Marion Dougherty, the show’s legendary casting director, honed her knack for spotting future stars as she went along.  

Let’s begin with the one of the tiniest speaking parts you can possibly imagine.  Squint at this scene from 1962’s “Torment Him Much and Hold Him Long,” which stars Robert Duvall (in one of four leading Naked City roles) and Barbara Loden (director of Wanda, wife of Kazan, fleetingly a sixties ingenue) as husband and wife, and you’ll see a black couple in the stairwell in the background:

 

The male half of that couple is one Bobby Dean Hooks, who under the more formal moniker of Robert Hooks would become a fairly important leading man a few years later; fittingly, he starred in the next major New York City police drama, N.Y.P.D.  This Naked City episode precedes any other recorded television or film appearance for Hooks.

“Dust Devil on a Quiet Street” takes place in the world of young, aspiring performers.  With its scrutiny of a faded acting teacher (Richard Basehart) and a disturbed young actor under his tutelage (Robert Walker), it’s one of the most detailed glimpses of the process of acting ever attempted in a television drama.  The original writer of “Dust Devil,” Anthony Lawrence, told me that he struggled with the script, and welcomed the revisions undertaken by Naked City’s legendary story editor, Howard Rodman.  Rodman’s wife at the time, Norma Connolly, was a character actress, and I suspect that Rodman’s observations of her work are the source of the authentic-seeming acting exercises in “Dust Devil.” 

Ironically, for a text so sympathetic to the plight of the struggling actor, none of the actors we see performing in Basehart’s workshop receive screen credit.  However, Dougherty got it right once again: four of the five actors playing actors went on to enjoy noteworthy careers.  The first pair to try out a scene (which Basehart decimates) are Penny Fuller (All the President’s Men) and Ken Kercheval (Dallas):

 

Other students who have a line or two each include Stephen Brooks (front row, looking to the left), soon to co-star in The Nurses and The F.B.I., and character actress Joanna Miles (farthest right), also a Dallas alumna:

 

Moving on to the extraordinary “King Stanislaus and the Knights of the Round Stable” – the one with Jack Klugman, John Larch, and a meat cleaver all locked together in a butcher’s freezer – I originally thought that this young brunette nurse on the right might be Elizabeth Ashley, who did play an early role on Route 66 (another Herbert Leonard / Marion Dougherty effort) around the same time: 

 

Wrong: it’s actually Broadway actress and director Joan Darling, later of Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law. 

A week later, in the episode “Spectre of the Rose Street Gang,” we catch a single glimpse of The Waltons’ Ralph Waite, likely in his television debut, as a chauffeur:

 

. . . and then in “The Highest of Prizes,” only a slightly longer look at The Stepford Wives’ Peter Masterson (shown with Paul Burke), likely in his television debut, as a ferry boat crewman:

 

The final episode of Naked City, “Barefoot on a Bed of Coals,” is famous for Dustin Hoffman’s brief but showy role in the teaser, as a two-bit holdup man who gets blasted by a beat cop (Steven Hill).  Hoffman made the closing credits – just barely, in the penultimate slot – but a lot of familiar faces around him didn’t.  Here’s the great Philip Bruns (The Out of Towners; Harry and Tonto; The Great Waldo Pepper) as a paramedic who grouchily tends to Hoffman’s wound:

 

And Melvin Stewart (Trick Baby; Scarecrow and Mrs. King) as a witness to the crime:

 

Soon it’s revealed that Hill’s character isn’t really a cop.  Fortunately, there are plenty of real uniformed policemen around, played by the likes of Ramon Bieri (Badlands; Sorcerer):

 

. . . and future biker movie star Tom Stern, also uncredited:

For the fellow TV junkies in the audience who had watched these Naked Citys before reading this post . . . how many of these actors did you spot?

Eight Million Stories in the NAKED CITY … Many of Them Uncredited (Part 1)

Naked City, the cop show of the early sixties that nearly every classic TV buff adores, is famous for three things: (1) the beautifully wrought dialogue and wonderfully strange characters created by its chief writers, Stirling Silliphant and Howard Rodman; (2) the extensive location shooting, which makes the show an ever more valuable etching of Manhattan at a specific moment in time; and (3) the roster of extraordinary character actors and future stars who received, in many cases, their first exposure on Naked City, after eagle-eyed casting executive Marion Dougherty spotted them on the Off-Broadway stages that had begun to flourish in the city.

Today’s post will address only the last of those elements of Naked City, one which has always been a source of both joy and frustration for me.  Joy, because Naked City frequently offers the thrill of spotting a favorite actor in one of his very first parts.  Like Bruce Dern, for instance, who hovers around the margins of “The Fault in Our Stars,” a 1961 episode in which he plays an aspiring theater actor:

(The man standing next to Dern is Alvin Epstein, whom New York magazine recently called “one of the most important classical actors of his generation.”  Another facet of Naked City’s historical value is that Dougherty often hired theater actors and acting teachers – including Sanford Meisner and Peggy Feury – who ended up making few, if any, other substantial appearances on film.)

Dern, in “The Fault of Our Stars,” does not receive credit on screen – and therein lies the frustration I mentioned above.  Because while Naked City scripts tended to include more speaking parts than your average one-hour drama – the show’s detectives canvassed the city in most episodes, talking to a cross-section of New York types as they sought each week’s wrongdoer – the large, ornate font of the credits left room for only a few of them to be acknowledged.

That stands in stark contrast to the other important New York-based dramas of the early sixties – The Defenders, East Side/West Side, The Nurses – which rigorously credited every bit player in the crawl at the end of the show.  (This is just a guess, but I’ll bet that union rules required New York-produced shows to credit every actor with a speaking part; certainly, they had to make room for some crew members, like scenic artists and electricians, whose positions were never credited on Hollywood-based programs of that era.  Because Naked City was technically produced in Los Angeles by Screen Gems, it may have been able to evade those rules.)

Let’s take another early episode as an example of how hard it was to snag a screen credit on Naked City.  “Button in a Haystack” has ten credited guest stars, beginning with Albert Salmi (a star character actor then) and ending with Mitch Ryan (an unknown then, but a star character actor a decade later).  But “Button” also features twenty-one unbilled actors in small speaking roles.  One of them (center) is the very recognizable William Duell, who played Sefelt, one of the asylum residents in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:

Here are the rest of the uncredited cast members of “Button in a Haystack,” and the roles they played: Paul Alberts (Luna), Griff Evans (Man with shovel), Mike Dana (Man in pit), Charles Roy Pritchard (Ballistics Expert), Herbert Ratner (Seymour), Stephen Hart (Beatnik), Vern Stough (Pretty Girl), Bernard Reed (Candy Store Owner), Pete Gumeny (Benevento), Tom Ahearne (Patrolman), Howard Morton (Ivy Leaguer), Jerome Raphel (Man with bucket), Edd Simon (Cop), Ricky Sloane (Martin), Joey Kennedy (Little Boy), Susan Melvin (Little Girl), Mac Munroe (Police Stenographer), Frank Tweddell (Mr. Jassey), Bo Enivel (Truck Driver), and Louis Guss (Counterman).

Recognize any of those names?  Neither did I, except for Susan Melvin (briefly a popular child actress, she appeared in the movie Ladybug, Ladybug and starred in an unsold pilot for Naked City’s executive producer, Herbert B. Leonard) and Louis Guss, who enjoyed a long career as a character actor, specializing in surly, swarthy Noo-Yawk types.

But many of the uncredited actors on Naked City do look quite familiar – either because they appeared in a million other TV episodes and movies in small parts, like Louis Guss, or occasionally because they went on to become major stars, like Bruce Dern.  When I watched Naked City for the first time, I recognized most of the embryonic stars (but not all of them, as I recently discovered) and some of the character actors.  But many of those unnamed faces drove me bonkers.  I knew they were somebody, but I couldn’t place the faces.  I wanted to identify them, and that information simply hadn’t been published anywhere.

Fortunately, many of the production records for Naked City survive among Herbert B. Leonard’s papers, which now reside in the Special Collections Department of UCLA’s Charles E. Young Library.  Recently I had a reason to peruse those papers, and while I was doing so I kept an eye out for the names of some of those uncredited actors that I couldn’t identify on sight.  Let’s take a look at some of them.  (For the purposes of this post, I’m excluding the earlier, half-hour incarnation of Naked City, because a) there are no DVDs from which to take frame grabs and b) its casting director, Jess Kimmel, didn’t possess the same skill in finding talented unknowns that Marion Dougherty had.)

First let’s go back to “The Fault in Our Stars,” which cast Roddy McDowall as one of several variations on Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov that he played around this time (“Journey Into Darkness,” for Arrest and Trial, was another one).  It turns out that the cab driver who fares poorly at the hands of McDowall’s Nietzchean fantasies was played by our old friend Chris Gampel.  I never would’ve recognized Gampel without help, since the top half of his face is cut off for the entirety of his only scene:

Later, in a beatnik joint where McDowall and friends applaud the performing poets by snapping their fingers, we catch a quick glimpse of an emcee (on stage, at left):

That’s Harvey Jason, the British-born character actor who appeared in Oklahoma Crude and The Gumball Rally, as well as dozens of TV shows in the seventies and eighties.

Later, we meet another struggling actor:

He’s played by Teno Pollick, who committed suicide in 1991.  Pollick had a very minor career as a television actor in the sixties, but he had another claim to fame – as one of Anthony Perkins’s boyfriends during the mid-sixties.

One of the earliest hour-long episodes, “Debt of Honor,” opens on a poker game, in which the dealer is played, without credit, by the familiar character actor Howard Smith:

Later, in one of the series’ most elaborate action sequences, the cops pursue a pair of gunmen who show up just long enough to engage in a fatal shoot-out with Detectives Flint (Paul Burke), Arcaro (Harry Bellaver), and Parker (Horace McMahon).  This is the about the best look you get at the faces of the two hoods:

The man on the left is Charles Dierkop, later a familiar face in movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (on which Marion Dougherty consulted, without credit) and a regular on Police Woman, as one of the Mutt-and-Jeff detectives who supported glamorous Pepper Anderson (Angie Dickinson).  After his “Debt of Honor” bit part, associate producer Sam Manners sent a memo to Dougherty, praising Dierkop for his helpfulness during the shoot and encouraging her to hire him again.  Dougherty must have seen merit in Dierkop as well, because the diminutive character actor turns up in bit parts in about a dozen Naked Citys.

And the fellow on the right in the image above?  His name is Jerry Ragni, and as far as I can tell, he is indeed the same Gerome Ragni who went on to co-write Hair.

Moving into the second season, Ernest Kinoy’s delightful, semi-comedic 1961 caper “The Hot Minerva” features Eugene Roche as a plainclothesman:

Someone at the Internet Movie Database noticed Roche’s unbilled appearance here, even though he’s squinting into the sun for all of his twenty seconds of screen time.  But Sharon Farrell’s blink-and-you-miss-it bit, as an actress who doesn’t seem to mind bumping into Detective Flint (series star Paul Burke), hasn’t been recorded on the internet until now:

Farrell soon skipped town and was playing leading roles on Hollywood TV shows less than a year later.

“A Case Study of Two Savages,” featuring Rip Torn and Tuesday Weld as a pair of hillbilly psychopaths on a bloody rampage across midtown, earned some notoriety in 1962 for its brutal and unexpected violence.  Torn has a scene where he buys a pistol from a cheerful young gun store clerk and then proceeds to wipe the smile off his face:

The clerk has several they’re-grooming-me-as-a-star close-ups and even a name – “Fred!” – so I expected him to turn up in the credits, but no dice.  If you’ve been keeping up with recent posts, you’ll recognize Fred’s real name – he is Tom Simcox, a star of Joseph Stefano’s The Haunted pilot.  Like Farrell, Simcox played his last bit part on Naked City before heading west and becoming one of TV’s minor leading men of the sixties.  (The Internet Movie Database may have scooped me on Simcox, but it also claims that Ned Glass appears in this episode as a bartender.  Wrong: the bartender is played by a less familiar character actor named Ken Konopka.)

“Today the Man Who Kills the Ants Is Coming” – perhaps the best of Howard Rodman’s wonderfully opaque episode titles – takes place mostly in the police squadroom.  Among the assembled cops there, we can catch quick glimpses of the Tony-nominated Broadway actor Rex Everhart (at right, with Milt Kamen):

. . . and the great African American actor Godfrey Cambridge (Watermelon Man), in the center of this crowd (wearing plainclothes):

Next time, we’ll continue our bit-player tour through the Naked City’s third and final season, which yields an ever more bountiful crop of uncredited young actors.

An Interview With Jason Wingreen: Part One

Jason Wingreen wants me to know two things before we begin.  First: He was born on October 9, 1920, and not in 1919, as the references books would have it.  This makes him only 89, one year younger than I and anyone else who ever looked it up has always believed.  These matters are important to an actor.  Second: I must promise never to divulge his phone number, which is unlisted and, indeed, immune to all my usual tricks for digging up unlisted phone numbers on the internet.  If it gets out, the “Star Wars people” will drive him crazy.  More on them in a minute.

Why do I, and why should you, care about Jason Wingreen?  Perhaps because, as the saying goes, there are no small parts, only small actors.  Wingreen is not a small actor.  He is, to trot out another much-abused cliché, one of those actors whose name you may not know but whose face you will recognize.  Even if you do happen to know his name, perhaps you sometimes mangle it.  One movie buff I know persists in calling him Jason Wintergreen.

In the face of your indifference and imprecision, Wingreen has played at least 350 documented roles on television and in the movies since the early fifties.  The actual total may be well over 500.  A handful of those roles have been meaty, like the guest shot as the would-be rapist who gets his ass kicked by Steve McQueen on Wanted: Dead or Alive.  A few have been semi-prominent, like the recurring part he played (that of Harry the bartender) on All in the Family and its successor Archie Bunker’s Place for seven seasons.  Many have been minor, but in shows that have been repeated a million times, like The Twilight Zone or Star Trek.  One of them was literally invisible: in The Empire Strikes Back, the second film in the Star Wars saga, Wingreen provided the voice of Boba Fett, the bounty hunter who captures Han Solo.  The weird cult that now surrounds the character of Boba Fett was not foreseen, and Wingreen received no screen credit.  His place in the history of Star Wars did not emerge until 2000, and when it finally happened, it changed his life.

Most of Wingreen’s roles have been what are rather harshly called “bits”: characters who walk on and off, say a line or two, function as deliverers of exposition or as background color.  With rare exceptions, small-part actors like Wingreen have been neglected by historians.  It’s easy enough to ask actors like Collin Wilcox or Tim O’Connor, the first two subjects of my occasional series of interviews with important early television performers, about their best roles.  They spent weeks or months creating those characters, and received a lot of attention for the results.  But how to interview an actor who toiled in anonymity, spending a day or less on most jobs?  Years ago, I looked up a handful of iconic bit players – Tyler McVey, Norman Leavitt, David Fresco – and quizzed them over the phone, with disappointing results.  Neither they, nor I, could remember enough detail about any one project to generate a substantive conversation.

But when I spoke with Jason Wingreen, he unspooled anecdote after anecdote in his polished, slightly metallic voice.  It was as if this actor who never played a leading role had saved up all the dialogue that his hundreds of characters didn’t get to say on screen and, now, was loosing it for the first time.  Wingreen’s recollections were often funny, occasionally startling, and always precise and detailed.  They were so detailed, in fact, that for the first time on this blog I am presenting an interview in two parts.  In the first, Wingreen discusses his formative years as an actor, his involvement with one of the 20th century’s most important theaters, and some of his first television roles.

Tell me a bit about your background and your childhood.

I was born in Brooklyn.  My parents moved from Brooklyn to a town called Howard Beach, in the borough of Queens, and that’s where I grew up.  I went to John Adams High School in Ozone Park, Queens, and graduated from there and then went to Brooklyn College.  In order for me to get from Howard Beach to Brooklyn College, I would have to take a bus, the Fulton Street El, and the Brighton Line, and then walk about half a mile to the college.  Which took about an hour and a half, approximately.  Each way, going and coming.  Three hours of travel for four years, for my college education.   We didn’t have an automobile.

What did you study?

I majored in English and Speech.  What I wanted to be when I grew up was a sportswriter, a sports reporter.  I was very much interested in sports, from an academic standpoint, although I did play baseball.  I was a skinny little kid.  In those days, kids could get skipped in the lower classes, and I was skipped twice, which was a big mistake.  For me.  I was advanced, twice, into a class with boys who were not only older than me but bigger and stronger than me.  The fact that I could play baseball saved me from a lot of bullying from the older boys.

At Brooklyn College, there was a mandatory speech class in your freshman year.  The course that I took was taught by an actor, a Broadway actor who was out of work and got a job teaching in the Speech Department at Brooklyn.  His name was Arnold Moss.

Oh, yes, a fine character actor with a deep, Shakespearean voice.

He was a dynamic teacher.  So when the term ended, I thought, I’m going to look for something else that this guy teaches.  I searched around and found out that he was teaching an acting class.  I signed up for it for the following semester, and I got hooked.  That was the end of my dream of my becoming a sportswriter.

Was your family affected by the Great Depression?

My father was a tailor.  He had a store that was just opposite a Long Island Railroad station in Howard Beach.  There were people living in Howard Beach who went into the city to work, [and] Howard Beach had a lot of firemen and policemen living in the town, and they were all customers of my father.  They’d bring their uniforms in, the cops and firemen would, and the accountants and the lawyers and so on who would take the Long Island Railroad into town would bring their clothes in to my father to be dry cleaned or pressed.  And that way my father was able to get through the Depression.  It was tight, it was very close, but he was able to do so.

My father was not an intellectual man, but he loved music.  When he’d open the store every morning, he would turn the radio on to WQXR.  Classical music, all day long in the store.  My sister grew up with that too.  My sister, Harriet Wingreen, has been the orchestra pianist of the New York Philharmonic for about thirty-five years.  She is five years younger than I am.  She really got the music life, and music itself drilled into her.  She went to Juilliard, and on from there.  I would say she’s the real talent of the family.  I’m just an actor.

From where does your family name originate?

It originated from, I think, Hungary, but we’re not Hungarian.  My parents both came from Lithuania.  We’re Jewish.  The name was Vengeren when my father got to Ellis Island, and at Ellis Island they Americanized it and gave him Wingreen.  They did that with all immigrants in those days.  My father met my mother when they were both in this country.  It was an arranged date, by the families.  My father came to this country – he was born in 1890 – when he was sixteen years old.  Alone.  He took a boat here with nothing except the name of a family, who were not relatives but friends, going back to the old country, and an address in Brooklyn.  He went to these people and they took him in and helped him to grow up there and to get a job.

So after you started studying acting with Arnold Moss, then what happened?

I joined the undergraduate theater group, called the Masquers.  Ultimately, in my senior year, I was president of the Masquers, and played the lead in the school play that the undergraduates put on every year.  I graduated in June 1941.

At that time, The New York Times was running an ad campaign, and it was “I Got My Job Through The New York Times.”  That was their slogan.  Well, I got my job through The New York Times.  I answered an ad in the Times one morning, which said, “Wanted: Young man to assist with marionette production.  No experience necessary.  Must have driver’s license.”

Well, I had a driver’s license.  I certainly had no experience being a puppeteer or a marionette, but I was a would-be actor.  So I answered the ad, and got a postcard back from the people inviting me to meet with them at their loft studio in Manhattan.  So I went, and auditioned for them with my voice.  They said they would teach me puppeteering, but they needed someone who could act the roles.  It was a company called the Berkeley Marionettes.  It was run by a man and his wife, Stepan and Flo, and their daughter.  They had two puppet companies which toured the city school system in New York, and in outlying areas too – Connecticut, New Jersey.  Stepan was the booker.  He would got to the various schools and book the shows, and Flo would preside over the actual puppeteering and write the scripts.  They were pretty much all shows based on classic children’s books.  The Mark Twain books, The Prince and the Pauper, Tom Sawyer, that kind of material.

There were two companies.  I would be in the number two company, which consisted of two men and one woman.  The woman in this case was the daughter of the owners, and the other man was the young fellow who had just married her.  Now, what’s interesting is that the young fellow who was my cohort was named Paul Bogart.  Paul became one of my closest friends, and became a very successful director.  He married the daughter of the marionettes, whose name was Alma Jane.

The war then came.  I, at that time, stood five feet and ten and a half inches, and I weighed 119 pounds.  Can you picture that?  And they put me in 1A!  1A.  I couldn’t lift a barracks bag!  However, I did my time in the army, in the war.  I went down to Oklahoma, to Eastern Oklahoma A&M, and studied to be a clerk.  Dirty job, but somebody had to do it.  I ultimately wound up with a fighter squadron: the 81^st Fighter Squadron, 50^th Fighter Group, 9^th Air Force.  I was in a town called Leamington, right on the coast behind the Isle of Wight.  The Isle of Wight is where all the boats lined up for the invasion [of France on D-Day].  You could just look out over the water and there they were, ready to go.

I kept records of the flights, and did other things.  One of my jobs was to get up very early and go into the office and get the fire started, so when the pilots came in they’d be warm.  When there was a flight planned, I would be the guy who would drive the pilots to the planes.  Pilots did not drive themselves to their planes in the jeep.  It had to be done by an enlisted man.  I think the thinking was the pilot could drive himself to the plane, but if he doesn’t come back, who’s going to bring the jeep back?  That was my theory.  I didn’t express it to anybody, but I think that’s the reason.

What did you do after the war?

I was in Germany when the war ended.  Came back on the Queen Mary with about 13,000 other soldiers, back to Howard Beach.  I went to the New School on the G.I. Bill, and I studied playwriting with a man named John Glassner, who was a professor, a teacher, a critic.  I still wanted to do some writing.

I went back with the puppet company.  They had a home in Woodstock, New York, where during the summer off-season when there was no school, no work, they would go up there and prepare for the following season.  Paul Bogart would write the scripts, and I would go on up there and stay with them and rehearse, and hang out with the Woodstock crowd.

There I met a few people who were interested in starting a theater group, and I attached myself to them.  We became very, very close friends, and then we got together in the city, in New York, and I did as much as I could with them.  Rented a loft and started working on a play, Alice in Wonderland.  In the summer we were able to rent the Maverick Playhouse in Woodstock, which had been built in 1912.  A wooden shack, practically, but a place that in the last row, you could hear somebody whispering on stage.  The acoustics were so fantastic.  It had been built by an actor named Dudley Digges, an old character actor, and Helen Hayes had played there once, way, way back when.  We put on a summer of plays, a Saroyan and an O’Neill play, and several others that I don’t recall.  But Alice in Wonderland was our first big production, and I played the Duchess, with a great big head!

When the summer ended, we decided we were going to look for a place to continue our theater group in New York City.  We found an abandoned nightclub, the Greenwich Village Inn, which had been closed by the police department for cabaret violations, and we rented it.  There was a central group of, at that time, six of us.  What I’m trying to get at is that I’m one of the founders of the Circle in the Square.  I was a producer, and one of the leading actors in the productions.  The others were Jose Quintero; Ted Mann; Eddie Mann, who was also a newspaper cartoonist; Aileen Cramer, who became our publicity lady and also did some acting; and a girl named Emilie Stevens, who was an actress and did costume designs, set designs.  That was our nucleus.  Eddie Mann and Aileen left after a year or two.

Ted Mann is still running the Circle in the Square, the one uptown, on 50^th Street.  He still has it, after all these years.  He is the lone survivor of all that group.  Ted and I never really hit it off, even all the years that I was there.  I wasn’t there for that many years, but I was there for, certainly, five of them.  We saw a lot of things in different ways.  And as a result, when Ted wrote a book on the history of the Circle in the Square, in some cases I was the invisible man.  He did not give me credits that I should have had, and I called him on it when the book came out.  He said, “Well, I didn’t remember.”  I said, “You know, you have my phone number.  You could have checked with me.”  The truth was that he didn’t want to.  He wanted to take all the credit for everything that transpired at the theater for himself.

What do you remember about Jose Quintero?  What was he like?

Absolutely brilliant director.  Funny kind of a guy.  I can’t really describe him too well, except that I admired him.  We got along very, very well.

Did he direct you in any productions?

Yes, he directed Summer and Smoke, the big hit with Geraldine Page in 1952.  In that production, I played old Doctor John, the father of the hero of the play.  Tennessee Williams watched some of the rehearsal with Jose, and it was decided by both of them that it needed an extra scene.  A scene between Miss Alma, played by Geraldine Page, and old Doctor John, played by me.  So Tennessee wrote that scene, and we included it in the production.  It’s not in the printed version of the play.  At any rate, it was a short scene, five to six minutes, just the two of us.  I tell you, I could have played that scene with her for ten years, she was so fabulous.

Tennessee became very active in that production, because it had been done on Broadway and failed.  What we did, particularly in the early years – this was my idea, and it seemed to work fairly well – we could take plays that we thought were good but didn’t make it on Broadway, and we would do them.  We turned failures into successes.  It happened on two or three different occasions.

One of those was called Burning Bright, by John Steinbeck.  On Broadway, it had Barbara Bel Geddes in it, and Kent Smith, Howard Da Silva, and Martin Brooks.  It was a four part play.  The lead, the man that Kent Smith and [later, at the Circle in the Square] I played, played three different characters in it: a circus clown, a ship captain, and a farmer.  The play was divided into those three elements.

At that time, Life magazine was running a piece called “Life Goes to . . .”  Well, we got a call saying Life wants to come down and do a piece called “Life Goes to an Off-Broadway Theater.”  So we said, fine, we’ll have a special performance on Monday night, our dark night, with an invited audience.  John Steinbeck came, himself, with his agent, and sat next to my mother.  My mother said to me, after the play, “You know, I sat next to John Steinbeck.  I said to him, ‘You see that man?  That’s my son!’”

Steinbeck said to her, “Oh, really?  He’s very good.”

We lived there, in the building, above the Circle in the Square.  Totally and completely against the law.  Like David Belasco had his own room above his theater, I had my room above my theater.   We really did have a firetrap, and it was finally closed by the fire marshal, and that was the end of my association with the Circle in the Square, for a year and a half.

Were you also doing live television while you were with the Circle in the Square?

Yes, I was on some of David Susskind’s shows.  He had a few series on: Appointment With Adventure, and Justice.  I did a Goodyear [Television Playhouse], either a Goodyear or a Kraft [Television Theatre], when I had the opening line of the show.  I was in the first shot and had the first line, and the cameraman was mounted on something.  The cameras were up a little higher than the ground, and as the scene started, the cameraman started waving bye-bye to me!  They were pulling the camera back.  Apparently something had fouled up, and they weren’t getting the shot.  But the show was going on anyway, so I went on with the lines and apparently the director in the control room picked it up with a different camera.  So I wasn’t necessarily seen, but my voice was heard delivering the opening lines of the show.

Oh, I got a job on a TV version of “Arsenic and Old Lace” [for The Best of Broadway, in 1955] with Boris Karloff.  Helen Hayes and Billie Burke played the old ladies.  Boris Karloff, of course, was the heavy character, and mine was a very, very small role.  I played a medical attendant.  I was a late hire, so I was only in for about two or three days, and they’d already worked on it for about two or three weeks.  Years later, I’m on a Playhouse 90 with Boris Karloff.  The first day of rehearsal, I went up to Mr. Karloff to say hello and tell him my name.  And I say, “You won’t remember me, but I worked with you in New York.”

He said, “Did you really?” in that wonderful Karloff voice.  And he said, “Ohhhh, yes.  With that bitch Hayes.”

I was a little shocked to hear that come out of Boris Karloff’s mouth, so I said, “Oh, really?”  He said, “Oh, yes.  She did everything she could to get Billie Burke off the show.”  Billie Burke used to be married to Flo Ziegfeld, way, way back.  She really was an elderly lady, and she had some trouble with lines and things like that.  Hayes, according to Karloff, tried everything to get rid of her because she wanted to get one of her friends to play the role.  But she didn’t succeed.

What else can I say about live TV?  I wasn’t crazy about it.  It’s not like theater, where you have time to really rehearse.  The rehearsals were very quick.  I liked television very much when it was not live.  If you flubbed something, you did take two, or take three if you had to.  I was in a movie called A Guide For the Married Man.  I played the husband of the lady that Walter Matthau was after, played by Sue Ane Langdon.  We come in from the party we’d been at, we come back to our apartment, and I immediately go to the refrigerator and start building myself a Dagwood sandwich.  Sue Ane goes behind me and puts her hand over my eyes and says, “Who was the prettiest lady at the party?”  I’m fixing my sandwich and I say, “You were.”  And she says, “What was I wearing?”  And I start describing the outfit of another one of the women of the party.

A wonderful scene, right?  Anyway, Gene Kelly, had us do that scene, I think, eleven or twelve takes.  Around the sixth or seventh, he came up to me and whispered in my ear, “It’s not you.  I’m trying to get her to do something, and she doesn’t do it.  Or doesn’t want to do it.”  And I’m there grappling with all this building a sandwich [business], about eleven times.  That’s what I like about TV that’s not live.  You could have some fun with it.  Live TV was too much pressure.  For me, anyway.

Did you ever go back to the Circle in the Square?

After the fire marshals closed us down, we had a little office somewhere for a year and a half, with nothing doing, nothing happening.  No place to take ourselves, nothing available for us to start another Circle in the Square.  We couldn’t live there any more, so I got an apartment on 28^th Street with the lady who became my wife a couple of years later, and who had been an actress in the company.  Her name was Gloria Scott Backe; she was called Scotty.

During the period of nothing happening, my wife and I went to a party uptown, where Jose and Ted Mann were also in evidence there.  We drove back down to the village in a cab, at which time Ted Mann said to me, “We found out that if we do some structural changes, we can reopen the theater at the original place.  You want to come back?”  And to tell you the truth, I had had enough of Ted Mann, and I’d also tasted a bit of TV and Broadway, and I decided.  Without even questioning my wife about it, I said, “No, I don’t think so.”  And as a result of that decision, I would no longer become co-producer of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, or The Iceman Cometh, all the big O’Neill successes that they had.  But I don’t care.  Because I went to Hollywood, and I did okay here, too.

How did that come about?

I got a Broadway show, called Fragile Fox.  It was a play about the war, written by Norman Brooks and directed by a man named Herbert Bayard Swope, Jr.  The stars were Dane Clark and Don Taylor, and others in the cast were James Gregory and Andrew Duggan.  We toured Cincinnati, Philadelphia, came into New York after six weeks, and it folded.  But Herbert Bayard Swope, Jr., got a contract at Fox out here in Hollywood, to come out and produce movies.  He sent for me.  Literally said, “Come on out here.  I can get a part for you on a couple of these movies.”

That was the beginning of the big move for me.  I was here for about five months, and it also led to Playhouse 90.  I was in the very first Playhouse 90 when that series came on, because Ethel Winant, who was the casting director at CBS, [had  been] an agent in New York, and I knew her from New York.  So she cast me in a small role as a pilot in the first episode.  It was a script written by Rod Serling.

What I did on Playhouse 90, which was awfully good at the time, was to assist with the blocking of the show.  The casts were all high-octane stars, name actors.  Well, we rehearsed for fourteen days for each episode, and you don’t have these people available for fourteen days.  You only bring them in after a show has been blocked for them, and then they take over.  So I would assist the director in blocking.  I’d have the scripts of the various characters.  Whatever had to be done, I would run the lines and the movements while the camera crew is watching, making their notes, and while the director is watching and making corrections and so on.  In each case, in addition to that, I would be given a small role to act in that show.  So I got double salary.  I got paid by the hour for the blocking work, and I got paid by the role in the acting part.  It worked out wonderfully for me, because as I can recall, that I did about twelve of them during that period.

Wingreen, at right, in “Forbidden Area,” the premiere episode of Playhouse 90.

Then I got homesick.  I wanted to go back and see my wife again.  She was doing a play, The Iceman Cometh, at the Circle.  My wife was very unhappy that I did not go back as a producer at the theater.  She never made a big deal out of it, but she was disappointed that I said no.  We never made a big thing out of it, but that was the way she felt.

So I went back to New York, and then the next year, which was 1957, I got a call again from Hollywood.  Ralph Nelson, who was one of the producers of Playhouse 90, wanted me back to play a small role in a production of “The Andersonville Trial” that he was doing, with Charlton Heston and Everett Sloane.  I was to play Everett Sloane’s associate prosecutor on “The Andersonville Trial.”  [This was actually “The Trial of Captain Wirtz,” an episode of Climax, a dramatic anthology that was, like Playhouse 90, broadcast from CBS Television City.  It was produced by Ralph Nelson and likely directed by Don Medford. – Ed.]

I did the show, and what did I have?  One word!  Six thousand miles back and forth just to say one word.  Charlton Heston makes a great, long-winded speech in this trial, and Everett Sloane turns to me and says – I’m sitting next to him at the table – he says, “What do you think of that, fella?”  And I reply with one word.  I have to tell you, unfortunately, I don’t remember what the word was.  It was not a short word, it was a long word, but I don’t remember what it was.  And that is what I was summoned three thousand miles to do.

I guess Ralph Nelson valued your work!

My presence was very important to Ralph Nelson, I suppose.  I don’t know why.  Maybe the part was longer, and when they finally got to shooting it, they cut a few speeches that I had originally made.  I didn’t see the original script.  All I got was the one that they were shooting that day.  Maybe for time purposes they cut it back, or maybe because Charlton Heston took too long making his speech.

The final move that I made was in 1958, when, again, Herb Swope, the man who got me out there the first time, said there was a part in a movie in Mexico with Gregory Peck, called The Bravados.  He said, “Do you ride?”

I said, “You mean a horse?”

So I discussed this whole thing with my wife and she said, “Yes, of course you can ride.  We’ll go on up to one of the riding academies here in Manhattan, and you’ll take a lesson or two.”

We went up to an academy that was up on 62^nd Street, and I checked in and there was a man that was sort of in charge.  He said, “The first thing we have to do is go downstairs and get ready with a saddle to fit you,” and all of that stuff.  Anyway, down we go.  He gets a bottle and two glasses, pours a big shot of scotch, and he says, “You start with this.”

So without knowing anything more, I took a shot of scotch.  Then I went up onto a horse.  He’s got a big whip in his hand.  He gives the horse a whack, and off we go.  I’m hanging on for dear life, going around and around and around.  And I think I might have done some screaming, too, while I was at it.  My wife is looking at all of this, absolutely appalled.  We went around a few times and I got off.  He says, “That’s fine, that’s fine.  Tomorrow we’re going to go out to Central Park.”

We got home that night and my wife says, “You’re not going back there tomorrow.  He’s going to kill you sooner or later!”  I said, “No, I don’t want to go back there.  We’ll get somebody else.”

So she looked it up in the telephone book and we [found] a place down around 23^rd Street, run by an English lady.  She had a horse called Pinky.  When I went there, she introduced me to the horse.  She said, “Pinky, this is Mr. Wingreen.  Mr. Wingreen, this is Pinky.”  Then she gave me a carrot to give to Pinky.  Then I got on that horse and we went slowly, slowly around.  We went around a few times and she says, “Mr. Wingreen, smile, you’re on camera now!”  And that’s how I learned to ride.  Then I could call Herb Swope and say, “Yeah, I’m ready to come.  Tell me the date when you want me and I’m off.”

And so I went out to Hollywood, and then off to Morelia, Mexico, for six weeks of this film.  Henry King, the famous old director from the silent days, was directing, and we had a cast of Gregory Peck, Stephen Boyd, Albert Salmi, Henry Silva, Joe DeRita, George Voskovec, and Andy Duggan, an old friend of mine, playing the priest.

I was going to play the hotel clerk who got involved in the chase after the bad guys, and that’s why I had to learn to ride, to be in the posse.  There was quite a bit of riding, and a Mexican horse was not a Hollywood horse.  Hollywood horses know “action” and “cut.”  They go and they stop.  Mexican horses don’t know those words.  They have to be hit to go, and you have to stop ’em!  You have to pull on the reigns to stop them, and I wasn’t successful every time we tried it.  Going up a cobblestone street, a sharp turn, holding on to a rifle.  It’s a wonder I’m still alive.

I had a very nice scene with Peck, though, when he rides into town [and learns that] his wife has been killed by some men while he was not home, and one with Joan Collins.  That was a nice experience.  So that sort of settled it for me as far as staying in Hollywood.

I called Scotty and I said, “Get somebody to replace you and come on out here.  Take a look and see whether you think this might not be it.  I have a feeling this is where we should finally settle in.”  So my career out here started.  It was slow at the beginning, but I made some good contacts.  I was helped by people I knew who had been here already, and they gave me tips on various things.  A lot of individual shots, just one day or three days.  Then the occasional series started.

Did your wife continue to act after you moved to Los Angeles?

She got one job, on a John Wayne movie directed by Henry Hathaway, who was very tough.  There was a scene with a big fair where they had food, and he placed her at a spit where they were roasting a pig or something like that.  They were shooting it up at Big Bear Lake, and it was the first scene of that day, the very first shot.  They’ve got fifty people out in canoes on the lake, and fifty or seventy-five people at this great big fair, and lights are going to come on very quickly as soon as they start shooting.  The first shot is right on my wife as she’s turning the spit.  And Hathaway, she said, had such a voice that he didn’t even need anything to holler through.  He was just using his own voice to yell “Action,” and they could hear him out there on the lake.

So he screams, “Action,” and the lights come on, and my wife, who was having trouble with her eyesight anyway, flinched and turned her head.  So then Hathaway yells “Cut!” and he goes up to her, and he sticks his face right into hers and says, “What’s the matter, honey?  Lights get in your eye?”

She says yes, and he screams right at her, “Well, you ruined the fuckin’ take!”

So she said to him, “I guess I’ll never be a movie star.”  For the rest of the week he called her Miss Squinty.  Then she said, “I’m through.  No more movies for me.  I want to be a housewife and a mother.”

One of your first roles in Los Angeles was on The Twilight Zone.  Do you remember your three Twilight Zone episodes?

Yes.  I played a conductor on a train which had James Daly going home to his house in Connecticut and falling asleep and thinking that he’s stopping at a town called Willoughby.  I played the conductor on the real train.  Jim Maloney played the short, round conductor on the dream train.  I had a couple of nice scenes in that, and at the very end I had the scene where I tell the trainmen that Jim Daly had jumped out.  He had hollered “Willoughby” and just jumped off the train and was killed.  And then when the hearse arrives, I help the guys pick up the body and put it into the hearse of course, and the door closes and it’s “Willoughby and Sons Funeral Home.”  I thought that was a terrific episode.

Serling wrote the script, and I had a feeling that he was getting something off his chest.  He was being bedevilled by the CBS brass, the big shots.  They wanted something from him that he wasn’t able to or willing to do, so he was kind of getting at them.  He made Howard Smith, who played the boss, a really miserable human being.  He said, “Push, push, push, Mr. Williams.  Push!”  Rod Serling was getting even [by caricaturing network executives in this character], I think.

Of the other two, one was an hour show, “The Bard.”  I played the director of a TV show.  An old Hollywood director, David Butler, directed it.  When I went to meet him he said, “Now, when I direct, I sit down.  So when you’re directing here, I want you to sit down too.”  So I played the role sitting down.  The wonderful English character actor John Williams played Shakespeare, and Jack Weston was in it, an old friend of mine.  He played the writer who had writer’s block, and he came upon a magic shop that was run by a great character actress named Doro Merande.  Burt Reynolds did a Marlon Brando impression on that one, and Joseph Schildkraut’s wife [Leonora Rogers] played the young woman on the show I was “directing.”

The third one was “The Midnight Sun,” with Lois Nettleton.  This was the one where they’re losing water on earth, and I played a neighbor and I came by to say goodbye to her because I was taking the family up to my brother in the mountains, where there was still some water.  A nice little scene.  I’ve only been to one convention, a Twilight Zone convention, and I met an awful lot of fans who told me that two of their favorites were “Willoughby” and “The Midnight Sun.”

Another of your early television roles, in 1960, was in a Wanted Dead or Alive episode called “Journey for Josh.”

Ah, that’s my big story.  I was saving that one for you.  It goes back to 1952, to the production of Summer and Smoke at the Circle in the Square.  The theater was an arena theater, like a horseshoe, and it led right out onto the sidewalk.  It was hard to keep the sound of the street out.  McQueen was a young, would-be actor at that time, and he had come for an audition to meet Jose Quintero for a part in one of the plays.  He had been rejected.  But he was a hanger-out in the Village, and he rode a motorcycle.

When Summer and Smoke became the tremendous hit that it was, every couple of nights Steve McQueen would park his motorcycle right outside the theater, at the curb, and wait for a quiet moment.  Then he’d rev the motorcycle.  He did that two or three times, with maybe a day in between.  During the third time, I was not on stage at the time.  I went out to the curb to him, and I said, “I know what you’re doing and I know why you’re doing it.  If you don’t cut this out, I’m going to get a cop to come over here and arrest you for disturbing the peace.”  So he gave me a last “Fuck you,” revved it one more time, and took off.  But never came back, for the rest of the run of the show.  That was my first encounter with Steve McQueen.

Now, it’s eight years later, 1960.  I’m in Hollywood, and I get a job on Wanted: Dead or Alive.  It’s a nice little part.  There are just three of us in this episode: McQueen, a young lady who’s living alone somewhere out on the prairie, and me.  My character is a kind of a drifter, who comes by and finds this young lady and tries to make a pass at her, and is interrupted by the arrival of Steve McQueen.  We have a battle, and he gets me, and that’s the end of my work on the show.  A three-day job, directed by a director named Harry Harris.

They hired a stunt man to do the fight scene for me.  Any time I had a job where I had to fight, I’d have a stunt guy.  In fact, there was one guy that used to do all of my work that way.  He didn’t really look that much like me, but he did all the fighting for me.  Harry Harris comes up to me and says, “Listen, I know we’ve got this guy to do the fight scene with you and Steve, but I want to use a hand-held camera on this one.  That means I have to get up close for some of the fight stuff.  We’ll choreograph it.  We’ve done that Steve before.  We’ll rehearse it a couple of times, and then when we do it it will work out fine.”

So I said, “Okay, fine.”

Now, meanwhile, before that, when I arrived for the first day of shooting, I’m introduced to everybody.  You know, “This is Steve McQueen,” and I shake hands with him.  I certainly did not say, “I know you from the Village,” and he didn’t indicate to me that he remembered me in any way.  He said hello, and a handshake, and then we go to work.

So now we’re in the third day of the shoot, and we come to the fight scene, where we struggle for a gun.  We’re on the ground, and he straddles me and picks me up by the collar, pulls me forward and hauls off and whacks me.  And of course I duck in the right place as we rehearse it, but I fall back.  That’s my last shot; I’m out of the picture.

Once we’re on camera, we go through all the same motions.  He pulls his hand back, I duck, and he whacks me right across the jaw.  Tremendous smash against my jaw.  I wasn’t knocked out, but I was stunned.  Of course, turmoil occurs on the set after this.  They rush to see how I am.  Before you know it, I’m in somebody’s care, being taken to the first aid station.  I’m sitting in the nurse’s office.  The nurse says, “Oh, that’s Steve, he does that to everybody.  There’s a long line of them that come in here.”

So anyway, I get my consciousness back, pretty much.  The door opens, and Steve McQueen comes in.  He comes towards me, and he says, “I’m sorry about that.  But, you know, you didn’t go back like we rehearsed it.”  Which was bullshit.  It wasn’t true at all.

I said, “Okay, Steve, forget it.  Just forget it.”

And he walked to the door, turned around to me, and said, “Say hello to Jose when you see him for me, will you, please?”  And out he goes.  He waited eight years for his revenge!

Click here for Part Two, in which Jason Wingreen talks about All in the Family, Steven Spielberg, Andy Griffith, Boba Fett and George Lucas, and more.