Obituaries: Lionel E. Siegel (1927-2013); Ron Roth (1936-2013)

During my research for this fall’s Then Came Bronson article and this tangential follow-up on the lost Chrysler Theatre episode “Barbed Wire,” I learned of the recent deaths of two of the men who made crucial contributions to those series when I sought to interview them.  Neither death was reported in the mainstream or trade press; here are brief, belated obituaries.

Lionel E. Siegel, a prominent writer and producer in dramatic television during the sixties and seventies, died of cancer on July 25, 2013, in Montreal, according to his wife, Rachel Lacroix.  Siegel, a Chicago native, had lived and worked in Canada since the mid-eighties.

Born November 30, 1927, Siegel made a late entry into the entertainment industry, notching his first television credits in his early thirties on Ben Casey, a medical drama whose producers were skilled at finding talented novices.  Siegel was talented, prodigiously so, especially in those earliest scripts.  “Sparrow on the Wire,” for Mr. Novak, dealt with anti-Semitism and free speech; “Let Ernest Come Over,” for Marcus Welby, addressed race, specifically the double standards for achievement applied to black professionals like Siegel’s police detective protagonist (Percy Rodriguez).  Siegel’s Rawhide script, “Corporal Dasovik,” is one the best and most uncompromising Westerns ever filmed for television (it won a Western Heritage Award).  A blatantly anti-military piece, “Dasovik” depicted the Cavalry as filthy and criminal, its leadership as cowardly and absurdly unfit.  It was either a conscious allegory for the Vietnam War, or else an accidentally prescient rendering of the way in which Americans would be forced to regard their armed forces after William Calley became a household name.

Those descriptions make Siegel sound like a firebrand of the Reginald Rose school, but he was equally accomplished at apolitical, character-driven stories.  “Lucky Day,” a Then Came Bronson episode I didn’t have room for in the A.V. Club piece, is one of the series’ best.  It’s a delicate little anecdote about the moments of panic and doubt experienced by a bride (Lynne Marta) and groom (Barry Brown), and the calm hand-holding that the slightly-older-and-wiser Jim Bronson undertakes to shepherd them to the altar.

Also in the sixties, Siegel spent four years on the writing staff of Peyton Place, which was less a soap opera than an excuse to string together wistful vignettes of small-town life, Winesburg, Ohio-style.  It’s difficult to determine who wrote what at this remove (each episode was credited to at least two writers), but Everett Chambers told me in 2005 that “Lee Siegel was the best writer of them all.”  Reached last month, Rita Lakin, another Peyton staff writer, recalled Siegel as “kind and friendly and quick with the sarcastic remarks.”

Contracted by Universal in the early seventies, Siegel did probably his best work as the story editor for the final season of The New Doctors, which (under the stewardship of a new producer, David Levinson) abandoned the series’ technological focus in order to tackle a hot-button controversy in each episode.  But Siegel’s career took a sharp, unexpected turn into escapism at Universal after he signed on as a writer, then story consultant, then producer and executive producer on The Six Million Dollar Man and its spin-off The Bionic Woman.  The bionic shows were reasonably well-made for what they were – kiddie fare that essentially assumed the prime time niche vacated by Irwin Allen – and they conferred upon Siegel enough professional cachet that he was poached by an independent company to develop a similar show around the Marvel character Spider-Man.  It didn’t last, and it’s a bit of a shame that Siegel never found his way back to the kind of adult-oriented drama at which he had first excelled.

Siegel’s other survivors include a son, Nicholas.

*

Producer Ron Roth died on May 28, 2013, according to the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.

Beginning his career as an assistant to producer Dick Berg at Universal in 1961, Roth worked on the second season of Checkmate, then followed Berg to the dramatic anthologies Alcoa Premiere and Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre.  Criminally underseen in the years since, both those series tried with some success to rekindle the idiosyncratic, writer-driven drama of live television on a California backlot; they attracted actors who rarely did television, and won a number of Emmys.  During the third season, after Berg had been elevated to develop features for the studio, Roth continued as one of several rotating producers on Chrysler Theatre.  Roth’s segments included “Barbed Wire,” an episode shelved for its controversial subject matter, as well as the Western “Massacre at Fort Phil Kearney” and the fourth-season premiere “Nightmare,” a juicy entry in the “psycho-biddy” genre, written by Leslie Stevens (The Outer Limits), directed by Robert Stevens (Alfred Hitchcock Presents), and starring Julie Harris in a dual role.

Roth, too, jumped into World Premiere telefilms and features – there was really nowhere to go in television from Chrysler Theatre but down – but at the worst possible time.  During the late sixties, studio chief Lew Wasserman personally approved every film that went into production at Universal, favoring out-of-touch duds like Thoroughly Modern Millie and Skullduggery, and leaving it to VP Edd Henry to turn down so many other projects that Henry earned the nickname “Mr. No.”  Roth developed Elliot West’s postwar spy novel The Night Is a Time For Listening and, intriguingly, a Rod Serling-scripted adaptation of Max Evans’s Western novel Shadows of Thunder (retitled The Devil in Paradise), with Alex Segal (All the Way Home) attached to direct.  But neither property went before the cameras, and Roth quit Universal in 1969.

(The only made-for-TV movie Roth completed at the studio, 1968’s The Manhunter, triggered the termination of star Sandra Dee’s contract, and wasn’t shown for four years.)

A year later, Roth and Chrysler Theatre story editor Robert Kirsch reunited with Berg at Metromedia.  There, and later at Playboy Productions and a succession of other studios and independent companies, Roth spent the next two decades producing a string of made-for-TV movies, both acclaimed (like the 1971 neo-noir Thief and the Emmy-nominated The Image, with Albert Finney) and absurd (like the disaster entry SST: Death Flight and the dune buggy gang flick Detour to Terror, starring O. J. Simpson).

In 1990, Roth left the television business for a second career in real estate and investment counseling.

Where Were You the Day Mia Farrow Cut Her Hair?: A Micro Oral History

In the early days of 1966, a seismic event rocked the soundstages of one of the most popular television series of the time, and, eventually, the pages of the gossip magazines.

Mia Farrow cut off all her hair.

Farrow, the twenty year-old breakout star of ABC’s smash prime-time serial Peyton Place, had become famous not just for her work on the series, but also for her romance with Frank Sinatra (who was two and a half times her age) and for the trend-setting long blond locks that hung down almost to her waist.

One morning, in the middle of a shooting day, Farrow took a pair of scissors and chopped off nearly all of those locks.  Eventually, her androgynous new ’do would become just as much of a fashion statement as the old one.  But, in the short term, the writers and production crew scrambled to fix the gigantic continuity problem that their mercurial star had suddenly created.  It wasn’t the first time they’d had to scramble to accommodate Farrow’s whims: a few months earlier, her insistence on joining Sinatra for a vacation on a private yacht off Martha’s Vineyard had forced the writers to abruptly put Farrow’s character, Alison Mackenzie, into a coma following a hit-and-run accident.

Ultimately, the episode in production during the infamous haircut- number 182 – took a self-reflexive turn.  A petulant Alison attempts to defend her shearing to a skeptical Dr. Rossi (Ed Nelson), in whose care she has remained after awakening from the coma.  Rossi guesses that Alison is acting out because of recent upheavals in her family life (specifically, she has learned that her birth occurred out of wedlock).  “You know what it really means, Doctor? It really means that I got tired of my long hair.  Simple,” is Alison’s final word on the matter.  Well, nearly final: as other characters saw Alison and reacted over the next few episodes, the writers worked in a few more barbs about the short hair.

This was Peyton Place’s JFK assassination moment, and its Rashomon – everyone who was present remembered it, and all of them remembered it differently.  Over the years, as I did the research that became the basis for my A.V. Club piece on the series, I came to see the incident of Mia’s hair as the ultimate example of both the value and the peril of oral history.  If the accuracy of any single source’s memory must be subject to doubt, the cross-section of incompatible impressions nevertheless captures the essence of the moment in dramatic detail. 

 

Ed Nelson (actor, “Dr. Michael Rossi”): One time she had been on a cruise with Sinatra and Claudette Colbert, on Claudette’s yacht down in the Caribbean.  When she came back, she was in a scene where she had been in bed and I had to help her walk.  And she wouldn’t look at me in any of the dialogue.  In between rehearsals, I said, “What’s the deal?  You’re not looking at me.”  She says, “Well, Claudette told me, ‘Never look at the man that much.  Let him look at you.’”  I said, “Oh.”  So when she got up to walk and I was supposed to grab her when she almost fell, I let her go and she fell.  She got up and started pounding on my chest: “You let me fall!”  I said, “If I’d let you fall as far as you should, you’d have gone to China!”  She was very, very upset ….

Patricia Morrow (actress, “Rita Jacks”): That’s so cute, because Mia, long before she went on a cruise, she knew more from her dad and her mom than anybody that there was a way for everyone’s attention to be [on her].  I was cracking up, because I loved her.  She was just so unique and one of a kind.  But in every scene, everybody’s eyes would gravitate to Mia on film.  It was because she was playing around with the makeup.  Bob Hauser, the director of photography, would say, “She can’t do that!”  He’d go to the makeup man and say, “You’ve got to do this and that,” and Mia always found ways around it.  She was so smart in her guts about what was attention-getting.

Richard DeRoy (executive script consultant): I’m not the earliest riser in the world, particularly in those days, and Paul [Monash, the executive producer] called one morning.  My wife Jewel comes into the bedroom and [says], “It’s Paul!”  I’m groggy.  What could he be calling me about?  He says, “Dick!  Mia cut off her hair in the middle of an episode!”  

I said, “Paul, we’ll deal with it.”  And hung up.  I don’t even remember what we did.

Del Reisman (associate producer): That was one of those times when Paul called me and said, “Get down on the set, fast.  Mia cut her hair.”  So I went down on the set with two or three other people, maybe Sonya [Roberts, a staff writer], and she had indeed cut her hair.  Well, film has to match.  You can’t have a girl with blonde hair down to her hips, and then the next scene there’s nothing.

Everett Chambers (producer): We went through the haircutting of Mia Farrow.  I got a call from the assistant director, who says, “You’d better come down on the stage.  Mia’s just cut her hair off.”  

I said, “What are you talking about?”  

He said, “She cut her hair!”  

“What do you mean?”  

“She cut her hair off.”  

So I go down there and she’s in the makeup room with no hair, right?  And I said, “Holy shit.  What is shooting?”  And they shot this scene, and they shot that scene, and they were supposed to shoot another one that was supposed to [happen] before the ones that she just did.  I said, “Uh-oh.  We’re in trouble.  How are we going to work that out?”  So I said to the hairdresser, “I dunno how you do it, put her hair back on!  I’ll be back.”  

I went up to Paul Monash’s office.  I said, “Paul, we got a problem.”  

“What is it?”  

I said, “Mia just cut her hair off.”  

He looked at me for a minute and he said, “You know, I just bought this book.  Takes place in Singapore.  It’s about this guy….”  He starts telling me all about that book.  Nothing to do with this problem.

I said, “Okay, Paul.  Thank you!”  

So I went into my office, looked at the script, saw we would have to change this and this, and then reverse this scene and put it here and add a couple of lines over here so it’ll make sense that she did it in between scenes.  So I worked that out, and we had to then get a writer to fix it and put the pages through and get it down on the stage.  That’s how we dealt with that.

Ed Nelson: I think she cut it herself, because it was whacked up originally.  Of course everybody knew nothing about it.  We were shooting and all of a sudden we found out.  So I went over to [makeup department head] Ben Nye and I had him put me on a bald head.  Bill Hole was our [associate producer], and I had him go in front of me and say, “Yeah, I know about Mia, but have you seen Nelson?”  And I went into the set and they went crazy!  They all laughed.  They even shot a couple of feet of film of Mia and I, which I wish I had.

Patricia Morrow: Ed is the one who actually made the situation much less tense on the set because all the producers and the broadcast people were there.  It was a nightmare.  All of us were just tiptoeing around on eggshells.  And it was such a relief to laugh.

Walter Doniger (series director, shooting or preparing another episode while 182 was being filmed): You know the story of her cutting her hair, don’t you?  Mia had beautiful long hair, and one day I’m walking down the street and I feel a [tense] vibration in the air.  I asked someone who worked on the show, “What the hell is going on?”  

“Mia cut her hair!”  

I said, “What?  In the middle of the day?”  

Paul Monash asked me to talk to her, and I went in to her and said, “What happened, Mia?”  She said, “It’s Barbara [Parkins, who played Alison’s on-screen rival Betty Anderson].  She looks in mirrors all the time.  I couldn’t stand it.  I decided I didn’t want to be that way myself, so I cut my hair.”  Barbara was a sweet girl, but very self-adoring.

Jeffrey Hayden (director of episode 182; from his Archive of American Television interview, conducted by the author): Mia was lovely – very young, very malleable, very eager to make it.  She, at a certain point, was going out with Frank Sinatra.  I knew Frank Sinatra; I’d met him a few times.  She came to me one day and said, “Oh, Jeff, I’m so excited.  I’m going to go out with Frank tonight, and we’re going to go here and there….”  This was early in the relationship.

I said, “Mia.  You’re in the first shot tomorrow morning, and I know Sinatra.  He’s going to keep you out, if he can, till three o’clock in the morning, with his date at the club, and he’s going to be singing, and he’s going to want to go out with his buddies.  And you’re going to go with him, and it’ll be four in the morning, and Mia – you’re in the first shot tomorrow morning.  Please.  You’ve got to be here on time, we gotta go.  It’s a big day’s work ahead of us, and I want to see you not bleary-eyed first thing in the morning, first shot.”

“Okay, Jeff, okay.  Don’t worry, don’t worry.”  

Next morning, seven o’clock, seven-thirty, no Mia.  Eight o’clock, no Mia.  I start shooting inserts, keeping the crew busy.  Nine o’clock, she’s not there.  She walks in [at] ten o’clock.  I said, “Mia, do you realize – you know, I’m shooting inserts so they don’t bother me from the front office.  But we have,” whatever it was, “ten pages to do today.  It’s ten o’clock.  Get to that makeup table.  Stop this little girl stuff!  You’re an actress.  You’re a mature person.  You’ve got a crew of seventy-five people waiting to shoot your scenes.”  

She left.  She walked over to the makeup table.  I’m now setting up the camera for her first shot.  She came a minute, a minute and a half later, she walked over to me, held up her hand, full of the hair from the back of her head, and she said, “Jeff, no more little girl stuff.”  And handed me all her hair.  

I said, “Mia.  We’ve gotta match your last scene from yesterday’s shooting.  What’ll we do?”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said.  “I just wanted you to know: I’m growing up.  No more little girl.”  

Del Reisman: She was, or had been, involved with Sinatra, and Nancy Sinatra, the wife or ex-wife of Sinatra, threw a birthday party for him.  It was his fiftieth birthday.  [Mia] was definitely not invited, and he [Sinatra] would not take her.  And she was so angry that she did this to herself.

Everett Chambers: After she did it, I had a meeting with her and understood that she was in some pain, with this relationship – with Sinatra.  She told me he didn’t invite her to his birthday party.  Then, of course, they get married [six months] later.

Del Reisman: The whole writing group met in my office: “Okay, what are we going to do?”  We decided that off-stage, she had had some kind of an emotional breakdown, because it was easy with that character to suggest that.  We had Dr. Rossi come in to the room, and the scene was this: Dr. Rossi, very angry, saying, “Why have you done this to yourself?  You’ve done a terrible thing.  You’ve hurt your mother, you’ve really hurt a lot of people by mutilating yourself.”  He had a huge speech, which a number of us worked on, and it was kind of our annoyance, the writing staff’s annoyance, at the fact that she messed us up.

Mia Farrow (from What Falls Away: A Memoir, 1997): It amazed me that girls my own age so often wrote about my hair, which in those days of “flips” and “bubbles” hung loose to my waist, solely because I was lazy and had never given much thought to it. The sudden focus on my looks and all the attention my hair was receiving was not entirely unpleasant, and that in itself made me wary.  The horror of vanity instilled in convent school – the same fear of pride that had let me to bury the rosary beads I had made from acorns – compelled me to cut my hair.

I waited for a moment in the Peyton Place storyline when it would fit; Alison’s nervous breakdown was perfect.  I didn’t ask for permission because I knew I wouldn’t get it: they would certainly oppose my changing any ingredient in a successful series.  So one morning before work, in the makeup room, I picked up a pair of scissors and cut my hair to less than an inch in length, laid it in a plastic Glad bag, and turned to the mirror.  It looked fine to me.  But the hairdresser was aghast, and the producers were upset, and people with wigs were summoned, and there were stern lectures about responsibility, and I apologized a lot, but privately I couldn’t see a problem.

There must have been nothing going on in the world that week, because my haircut got an absurd amount of press coverage.  There was wild speculation as to why I’d done it: some said it was to spite Frank, and back in New York, [Farrow’s friend Salvador] Dali, never one to minimize, labeled it “mythical suicide.”  But there was no drama, no fight with Frank, he loved my hair the minute he saw it, so I kept it short for years.

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).

This Is The Continuing Story….

Ever since I discovered it ten years ago, one of the series I’ve most wanted to write about in a definitive way is Peyton Place.  Most of the truly canonical television series have been identified, if not universally agreed upon, by now.  I think Peyton Place may be the one exception – the sole long-running American show that belongs in the pantheon but has generally been excluded.  To my great delight, The A.V. Club has given me the opportunity to make a case for its excellence.

I’ve also written about Peyton Place in a less comprehensive way in a few other places.  After you read the A.V. Club piece, you may want to check out (or revisit) my interviews with writer-producer Richard DeRoy and actor Tim O’Connor, my obituary for director Walter Doniger, and my thoughts on James Rosin’s book about the series.

In addition to the four people named in the preceding paragraph, I also want to acknowledge a number of others who spoke to me about Peyton Place over the years: the late Franklin Barton; the late Gerry Day; the late Harold Gast; Lee Grant; Jeffrey Hayden; Patricia Morrow; Ed Nelson; Peggy (Shaw) O’Shea; the late William Self; and Jack Senter.  In particular, I’m grateful to the late Del Reisman, who spent many patient hours discussing this and other shows with me over the course of several years, and to Sonya Roberts, an off-the-record friend of long standing who finally and graciously consented to become a source for this piece.

As was the case with Ben Casey, there will be a few sidebars here during the next few weeks to showcase some of the research that didn’t make it into the A.V. Club essay.

(A final postscript: I spent some time trying unsuccessfully to locate the three African American writers who briefly joined Peyton Place‘s writing staff in 1968. Gene Boland and Sam Washington, if you happen to come across this post, I’d love to interview you.)

Obituary: Walter Doniger (1917-2011)

Walter Doniger, one of the most exciting of the early episodic television directors, died on November 24 at the age of 94.  He had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for a number of years.

A natural behind the camera, Doniger (pronounced with a hard “g”) favored long takes, composition in depth, and a relentlessly mobile camera.  Though he was reluctant to acknowledge his sources and insisted that his style grew organically out of the material he was given, Doniger’s best work drew from the films of William Wyler, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, and particularly Max Ophuls.  The Doniger look paralleled, on film, the live and videotaped work that John Frankenheimer was doing at the same time, in Climax and Playhouse 90, on the stages of the CBS Television City.

Originally a screenwriter (of Rope of Sand, Tokyo Joe, and Along the Great Divide), Doniger, like most writers who become directors, grew frustrated with how his words were interpreted on screen.  Television gave him the chance to direct (and gradually phased out his writing career, although he penned a terrific 1962 Dick Powell Show called “Squadron”).  One fairly early outing was “The Jail at Junction Flats,” the 1958 second-season premiere of Maverick and an episode famous for its contrarian non-ending.  Ed Robertson, author of the fine companion book Maverick: Legend of the West, described Doniger last week as “an early advocate of ‘forced perspective,’ the innovative style made famous by Sidney Furie in The Ipcress File,” and added that

Doniger’s use of close-ups, particularly in the sequences where Garner and Zimbalist tie each other up, also made “Junction Flats” one of the most visually interesting episodes of Maverick.  As series writer Marion Hargrove noted in my book (which, by the way, will be re-released soon), “Doniger was a good director, although I remember that Garner and Zimbalist kidded him about using a lot of close-ups. One day, Jim showed up for work wearing just about enough makeup for an Academy Aperture: extreme close-up of his face, from his eyebrows to his lower lip.”

But maybe Garner really wasn’t kidding.  “The Jail at Junction Flats” was to be Doniger’s only Maverick.  Combative and uncompromising, Doniger alienated many of the producers and stars with whom he worked.  He directed significant runs of Cheyenne and Bat Masterson, but his resume is dotted with an unusually large number of major shows for which he directed a single episode: Highway Patrol, Checkmate, The Detectives, Mr. Novak, Judd For the Defense, The Virginian, Night Gallery, The Bold Ones, Barnaby Jones, Movin’ On, McCloud.

Then came Peyton Place, the 1964 megahit prime-time serial.  Doniger directed the series’ second pilot, after an initial hour (directed with Irvin Kershner, and with some significant differences in the cast) was rejected by ABC.  The series ran twice a week, and Doniger split the directing duties with a far less flashy director named Ted Post.  In his episodes, Doniger crafted a consistent aesthetic based around deep-focus compositions and lengthy dolly shots.  This technique required the actors and camera crew, accustomed to the bite-sized, shot-reverse shot approach that was common in television, to master longer sections of script at a time and to hit their marks with absolute precision.

Doniger drove everyone crazy on Peyton Place.  Producer Everett Chambers briefly fired him after an on-set blow-up between Doniger and actress Gena Rowlands, and Chambers’s predecessor, Richard DeRoy, sniffed that Doniger “would give me fourteen pages of notes on a half-hour script and I’d . . . put it in my drawer and forget it.”  But Doniger knew that he had a protector in executive producer Paul Monash, and he used that impunity to get away with some of the most daring shots ever executed on television.  “I could try anything because I knew they wouldn’t fire me,” Doniger told me in a 2004 interview.

In one episode, for instance, Doniger staged a three-and-a-half-minute party scene, with dialogue divided among almost the entire principal cast, in an unbroken shot that had the camera circling through the Peyton mansion set several times.  In another, Doniger placed the camera in a fixed position on a crane overlooking the town square.  After the crane had descended, the operator removed the camera from its mount, stepped off the crane, and followed an actor onto a bus that drove off the backlot.  (Doniger’s cinematographer on Peyton Place, Robert B. Hauser, was also a genius, who had helped to establish the newsreel-influenced, handheld-camera aesthetic of Combat.)

In a show that maintained a dangerously disproportionate talk-to-action ratio, Doniger’s imagery created a formal density, a cinematic quality, that distinguished Peyton Place from the corps of superficially similar daytime soap operas.  Taken as a whole, Doniger’s episodes of Peyton Place comprise a suite of some of the most elegant compositions and camera movements ever executed on television.  Below I have assembled a small gallery of “Doniger shots” – a term that he used proudly in our interview, although I can’t remember whether it was Walter or I who introduced it – but of course they can illustrate only Doniger’s eye for framing and lighting.  To see his camera in motion, you’ll have to track down the thing itself.

(Only the first sixty-five episodes of Peyton Place, one of the four or five great masterpieces of sixties television, have been released on video; tragically, Shout Factory appears to have abandoned the series due to poor sales.)

In 1968, after directing about 175 half-hours (not sixty-four, as the Internet Movie Database and his Variety obit would have it), Doniger left Peyton Place of his own accord to accept a contract with Universal.  Typed as a serial drama specialist, he directed the pilot for Bracken’s World and ended up as a producer on The Survivors, a glitz-encrusted, Harold Robbins-derived disaster that anticipated the eighties boom of glamorous nighttime soaps.  After that it was back into episodic television, including some good shows (Owen Marshall; Lucas Tanner; Movin’ On; Ellery Queen) and back to fighting with producers and stars; Doniger gave Robert Conrad, of Baa Baa Black Sheep, particular credit for inspiring his semi-retirement.

Although he never found another canvas like Peyton Place, Doniger continued in this late period to develop his distinctive look.  In their book Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-Hours Tour, Scott Skelton and Jim Benson called Doniger’s camera moves “complex and sinuous,” and documented his sole effort for that series, the Serling-scripted “Clean Kills and Other Trophies,” in some detail:

Notes assistant director Les Berke, “Normally when you would do a four-page scene, you do your rehearsal, then you do a partial or full master shot, and then you go in and get all your coverage shots.  But with Walter, he would go in and shoot three-, four-, five-page masters and the reverses were built into the master in such a way that all you had to do was go around on one person usually, pick up their close-ups for the entire scene and walk away from it.  He was brilliant.  Walter Doniger made many a camera operator want to commit suicide.”

“This was very hard on the crews,” admits Doniger, “but you have to learn to take risks in my business or you become a hack.  When you do those shots, you have to have an excellent camera operator, an excellent crab dolly man, an excellent focus puller, and all three of them have to work together at the right instant or it doesn’t work.  I thought that I could ‘flow’ the camera so that the audience wouldn’t be distracted by a lot of cutting.”

And yet Serling disapproved.  Skelton and Benson wrote that the author “stated later he would have preferred a blunter, more visceral visual interpretation to match the violent undercurrents in his script.”  Translation, perhaps: don’t use your camera to distract from my words.  Night Gallery was another one-and-done for Doniger.

Although he wrote and produced the grade-Z action flick Stone Cold in 1991, and tried to get other scripts off the ground well into his long illness, Doniger’s last work as a director was the 1983 made-for-television movie Kentucky Woman.  This Norma Rae-ish film, which starred Cheryl Ladd as a woman forced by poverty to work as a coal miner, was Doniger’s personal favorite, perhaps because, as its producer and writer, he had more control over it than anything else he directed.

Like Sutton Roley, a cult figure whose exuberant camera pyrotechnics are slightly better known among TV aficionados, Doniger should have been a major film director.  (He did direct a few minor but interesting B-movies early on: Unwed Mother, House of Women, and Safe at Home.)  Bad luck, the industry stigma of working in episodic television, and his own willfulness sabotaged his career.  If it ever becomes easier to assemble recordings of all the world’s television episodes and cross-index them by writer and director, then scholars may rediscover Doniger.  Until then, you can take my word for it that he was a small-screen equivalent of Joseph H. Lewis or even Sam Fuller, a director who placed an unmistakable visual stamp on nearly every piece of film he touched.

Dorothy Malone and Mia Farrow (episode 192, March 10, 1966).

Ryan O’Neal and Barbara Parkins  (episode 342, June 5, 1967).  In James Rosin’s book Peyton Place: The Television Series, Parkins said that Doniger “would encourage me at times to speak more with my eyes than with my words.  He’d allow me that moment of silence where the look would sometimes express much more than the dialog [sic].”

Leigh Taylor-Young  (episode 334, May 8, 1967).

Doniger’s fetish for framing action within objects in the extreme foreground usually added meaning; here, Betty (Barbara Parkins) is a prisoner in the wine goblet of her emotional blackmailer, the wealthy town patriarch Martin Peyton (George Macready, barely visible on the right) (episode 334, May 8, 1967).

Thought of the Day

Is C. Montgomery Burns of The Simpsons a partial caricature of Peyton Place‘s malevolent town patriarch Martin Peyton?  No one else on the whole of the internet seems to have suggested this idea, and I grant it would be an obscure connection.  But Burns’s voice, in particular, recalls the breathy, aged drawl of the great George Macready.  And it strikes me as the kind of thing that Harry Shearer, who voices Mr. Burns, would remember.

And if you’re wondering why I’m in a Peyton frame of mind (not that one ever needs a special reason to be), well, my next post will make it clear.

The Summer Man

The fourth season of Mad Men was the series’ finest thus far.  The narrative strands that took the show into areas of tonal inconsistency – Peggy’s surprise pregnancy; Don’s Carnivale-worthy childhood flashbacks – have been erased or smoothed over.  Mad Men now has a roster of rich, fully-developed characters upon which the writers and actors can riff with confidence and take in a thousand different directions.  Of the television series I’ve seen, only a tiny handful have lasted long enough and stayed good enough to enter this zone: The Dick Van Dyke Show, Peyton Place, maybe St. Elsewhere, middle-period ER, The Sopranos, maybe The Shield, the American The Office, The Wire.  Perhaps I’m just rationalizing personal taste, but Mad Men further commits me to the theory that for television the serial drama is the apotheosis of the art form.

I could go on like that.  But in keeping with the theme of this blog, I’m just going to focus on some (but by no means all) of Mad Men’s connections to actual sixties television.  As we saw in Season 2, Harry Crane’s (Rich Sommer) promotion to head of the (one-man) television department meant that the fictional admen of Sterling Cooper would interact with the real-life TV biz of the mid-sixties.  Though it offered nothing as elaborate as a whole episode wrapped around The Defenders, Season 4 was peppered with vintage TV references.

• In the season opener, “Public Relations,” Harry sells a jai alai special to ABC, which he says is now interested in telecasting unusual sporting events.  He doesn’t mention the name, but it’s clearly a reference to the network’s Wide World of Sports, which had become popular by doing exactly that during the early sixties.  Incidentally, that jai alai fad that Mad Men has chortled over several times was no joke.  I’d never heard of the sport until I came across a 1963 Route 66 episode (“Peace, Pity, Pardon”) about a Cuban jai alai team.
• In “The Good News,” Harry hears that Don will have a twenty-four hour layover in Los Angeles and asks him to have lunch with “Bill Asher at the Brown Derby.”  Asher created Bewitched and therefore a lot of Mad Men bloggers caught this one, because that show’s Darrin Stephens was a Madison Avenue ad man (something I’d forgotten, I confess).  But when Harry grumbled that Asher would probably cast Don in something, I thought maybe it was a jab at Don’s looks and that he might have been thinking of the beach party movies that Asher was directing for AIP in 1964-1965.  I would have said that Bewitched in-jokes were too cheap for Mad Men, until I got to the episode (“Hands and Knees”) in which Roger Sterling (John Slattery) was thumbing desperately through his rolodex and calling former clients.  He reaches someone named Louise, who tells him that her husband Larry has passed away.  I surrender: Larry Tate was Darrin’s boss on Bewitched, and his wife was named Louise.
• In “The Summer Man,” Harry (sitting next to his autographed photo of Buddy Ebsen in full Beverly Hillbillies attire; hyuk!) tries to talk freelancer Joey Baird (Matt Long) into auditioning for Peyton Place.  He says that one of “Ryan’s” (Ryan O’Neal) “rivals” has been giving an embarrassing performance, and that there could be an opening.  “Can’t tell you who,” insufferable star-fucker Harry says, so we can only speculate on which actor Joey might have replaced.  I doubt very much that Matthew Weiner et. al. went to the trouble of quizzing surviving cast and crew but, in fact, there were several disappointing second leads on Peyton Place around that time who might have been written out of the show sooner than planned.  Richard Evans, who played Paul Hanley (Allison’s unintentionally creepy college-age suitor), and Don Quine, who played Gus Chernak (a hoodlum who died after Rodney, O’Neal’s character, beat him up), come to mind.  That’s only the most prominent of several Peyton Place references in Season 4, which takes place right at the height of Peyton’s huge popularity.
• Incidentally, Harry reveals that he sent Joey’s Polaroid from the office Christmas party (depicted in “Christmas Comes But Once a Year”) to Bernie Kowalski in Hollywood.  Bernard L. Kowalski was a real person – he collaborated with Sam Peckinpah at Four Star and directed the Mission: Impossible pilot around the time of this season’s events – but as far as I know he had nothing to do with Peyton Place.  Just me, but I don’t think Joey would’ve been so hot as Mr. Briggs.
• In “The Beautiful Girls,” Joan (Christina Hendricks) watches The Patty Duke Show; and in “Chinese Wall,” Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) watches Hazel.  I wouldn’t necessarily have predicted that either character would be a fan of those particular series.  But, hey, in 1965, there weren’t a whole lot of choices when you turned on the TV.

 

 

Who Are Those Guys #3

While we’re on the subject of Peyton Place, perhaps it’s time to bring back an occasional feature of this blog.  That’s right, it’s time again for “Who Are Those Guys?” in which you, the reader, help put a name to the faces of some of television’s many uncredited small-part actors.

Peyton Place presents a particularly thorny knot of unidentified bit players.  Because the show’s regular cast was so large, guest stars were almost always out of luck when it came time to make up an episode’s end titles.

Among the familiar faces who passed through Peyton Place without screen credit are Milton Selzer, Dabbs Greer, Virginia Gregg, Myron Healey, Hari Rhodes, Don Collier, Jack Dodson, Bert Remsen, Greg Morris, Virginia Vincent, Don Hanmer, John Zaremba, Byron Morrow, Curt Conway, Gilbert Green, Maxine Stuart, Peter Hobbs, Bartlett Robinson, Paul Newlan, Amzie Strickland, Irene Tedrow, Val Avery, John Lasell, George Chandler, Eleanor Audley, Bill Zuckert, James Anderson, Charles Irving, Alberta Nelson, S. John Launer, Hugh Sanders, Meg Wyllie, Naomi Stevens, Ed Peck, William Sargent, William Wintersole, Rusty Lane, Owen Bush, Paul Sorensen, Walter Mathews, Ed Prentiss, Steven Marlo, Melinda Plowman, Nichelle Nichols, and a young Richard Dreyfuss.

Some of these unfortunate actors made multiple appearances without ever breaking into the credit roll.  Jim Boles and then Star Trek’s James Doohan were semi-regulars for a while, playing successive chauffeurs to town patriarch Martin Peyton.  Russ Meyer chum Stuart Lancaster – the leering old man from Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! – popped up now and then over the years as Jerry, the printer, in Elliot Carson’s newspaper office.

All of the actors mentioned above are folks I spotted while watching the show.  But there are many more that I couldn’t identify.  Let’s take a look at just two.

During episodes 52 through 55, Norman Harrington (Christopher Connelly) gets beaten up by a couple of teenaged punks in a storyline that eventually gets him a girlfriend (Patricia Morrow as Rita Jacks).  One of the two toughs is played by an uncredited Mickey Dolenz, a year before he became one of The Monkees.  Does anyone recognize the other punk (below, left, with Dolenz)?

 

During episodes 77 through 80, Betty’s high school pal Janet Sinclair enters the maternity ward of the Peyton Hospital.  The unmarried Betty (Barbara Parkins) has just found out that she’s pregnant with Rodney’s (Ryan O’Neal) child, so the point of the Janet Sinclair arc is basically to rub salt in her wounds.  Janet is played by Bonnie Beecher (unbilled, naturally, and pictured below), an ingenue who appeared on The Twilight Zone and Star Trek before leaving acting to marry Wavy Gravy.

 

However, I can’t figure out who plays Janet’s husband Bob in two brief scenes.  Here he is, between O’Neal and Parkins:

 

Submit your answers in the comments!

Peyton Place, Or: The State of Television History Upon the Demise of the Publishing Industry

James Rosin has a cottage industry of episode guides going.  Since 2007, Rosin has published slim companion volumes for seven classic television series: Route 66, Naked City, Adventures in Paradise, Wagon Train, The Invaders, Peyton Place, and Quincy, M.E. (on which Jim worked briefly as an actor and a writer).  He has excellent taste – every one of those shows are worth remembering – and a prolificity that I frankly envy.

However, I haven’t written about Jim (who’s also a really nice guy) until now because I have had some reservations about his approach.  All of Rosin’s books begin with a brief production history, and draw upon his own interviews with at least a few of the creative people involved in each series.  But the bulk of each book is devoted to plot summaries.  I’ve never understood why writers of television episode guides do that.  Episode recaps may be useful for reference, but they aren’t readable for pleasure.  I mean, if you have seen the episode, you don’t need to read a plot summary, and if you haven’t, you won’t want to “spoil” it, right?  Like Martin Grams, Jr., about whose massive Twilight Zone book I had mixed feelings, Rosin declines to editorialize at all about the content of the shows.

It’s not that Rosin’s work was subpar, but when I read his books (full disclosure: all of which he generously supplied to me at no charge) I was left wanting more.  Most of those shows, especially Naked City and Route 66, deserve – no, require – a much more exhaustive account of their making.

However, when Jim sent me Peyton Place: The Television Series last year, I was relieved that I could recommend one of his books without many misgivings.  Peyton Place was a young show – most of the principal cast and many of the writers were in their twenties or early thirties during its production – and therefore there more of the creative staff are still with us than would be the case for a typical sixties series.  Rosin has interviewed about twenty-five of those survivors and assembled their collected testimony into a breezy, informative oral history.  This introductory chapter comprises fewer than fifty pages, but it covers all the essential rollercoaster events in the making of this smash hit-turned-midseason cancellation.  The abrupt shearing of Mia Farrow’s hair in late 1965 was the great Rashomon moment of sixties television – everyone who was there remembers it, but differently – and I knew it would be my test of the book’s value.  Rosin quotes four people on the subject: passing grade.

I also like the way Rosin handles the intricate serialized storyline of Peyton Place.  Around the time I launched the Classic TV History website, I was thinking of tackling a thorough history of Peyton Place, and I began to interview some of the same people Rosin spoke to for his book.  But I could never figure out how to structure an episode guide.  It seemed that Peyton Place, with its 514 plot-choked episodes, would require an encyclopedia of story information.  Instead, Rosin has assembled a very accessible plot summary for each of the show’s five “seasons” (since Peyton Place aired without summer reruns, those divisions would have been apparent only to the production staff, not to viewers), without worrying about entries for each individual episode.  Preceding that is a roughly chronological listing of the hundred or so series regulars and semi-regulars.  It works, and probably better than whatever jumble I would have come up with.

Finally, Rosin includes a center section of terrific publicity and behind-the-scenes stills, along with a few key production documents.  My favorite is the one reproduced below, which depicts the show’s 1965 writing staff standing around a Peyton Place signpost prop.

In my research on television writers of this era, I made the acquaintance of six of the eleven people in that photo.  Being able to see what they looked like at a moment in time that I discussed with each of them means a lot to me.  It’s very rare to find a photograph of the assembled writers for a sixties television series (even for a show that used an in-house staff, rather than freelancers).  It’s fortunate, and appropriate, that Rosin has found one for Peyton Place, since this underrated melodrama was one of the best – if not the best – written American television show of its day.  Peyton Place also celebrated writers and writing within its narrative: Constance owned a bookstore; Allison was an aspiring storyteller; Elliot became a novice newspaperman late in life; and so on.  It may be unique in that emphasis, at least among sixties television series, and that’s one of the many reasons I love Peyton Place.

*

James Rosin’s books are self-published, and so are many of Martin Grams’s.  From what I can tell, both of them travel the circuit of film, book, and nostalgia conventions – of which there are a surprising number, in third- as well as first-tier cities – where they can interact with fans as well as sell and sign copies of their books.

I assume that works for them, but it wouldn’t work for me.  For one thing, I don’t know how to drive a car, and for another, I suppose I could be called “reclusive.”

When I first started doing research on television and film history in the late nineties, while I was still in college, it dawned on me that if nothing else, I could publish on the then new-fangled internet.  That was a huge relief.  A decade earlier, if a scholar was doing work too esoteric to find a real publisher, no one would have read it.  Having the internet out there as a backup felt empowering, and it appealed to my perfectionism.  I decided that I would not work with small presses whose existing catalogs were poorly proofread and edited.  I would give my work away for free on the internet before I would sell it to a small press that wouldn’t distribute it properly, that would put an $85 cover price on it and never get it on the shelves in bookstores.

So, here you have it: I’m giving it away for free on the internet.

Of course, when I was in college, there were still major and semi-major presses that published books about old television shows and biographies of pop culture figures who were not household names.  There still had bookstores back then, too.  So it seemed possible, if not likely, that I could con a “real” publisher into doing a book about some TV show or personality that nobody had ever heard of.

Today, that gravy train is over.  I have no idea how Stephen Battaglio managed to get St. Martin’s to publish his David Susskind biography, or how David Bianculli sold his recent Smothers Brothers book to Simon & Schuster, because I see fewer and fewer works of that type coming out these days.  That’s a huge loss.  Battaglio and Bianculli are experienced journalists, working with pr editors, and it shows.  Writers like Rosin and Grams (and myself), who don’t have that kind of professional training, have to fend for ourselves, and that shows, too.  Enthusiasm doesn’t always cut it.  Even though I can recommend Jim’s Peyton Place book, I can’t pretend that it is a vital piece of scholarship in the way that Battaglio’s and Bianculli’s books are.  There was a moment in the eighties and early nineties where a TV episode guide – I’m thinking of Marc Scott Zicree on The Twilight Zone, David J. Schow on The Outer Limits, Vince Waldron on The Dick Van Dyke Show – could be researched, written, and edited with the same professionalism and seriousness as a biography of Roosevelt or Kennedy.  That feels like a long time ago.

Of course, when I realized I could give it away for free on the internet, I was thinking in units of “books” and “articles” – because that’s what they had back then.  When I launched my website, this blog was an afterthought.  Now it’s the engine, not the caboose.  And blogging has given me freedoms other than the search engine’s guarantee of like-minded readership.  I can publish a short blurb like last week’s Honey West bit, or a thirty-seven hundred word monster, like the Sidney Lumet appreciation that preceded it.  I’m not bound in terms of subject matter, either.  I can skip around from one show or person to another; I can write in response to current events, or just about whatever pops into ahead.  And it’s instantaneous.  I don’t have to wait years for a book to come out, or months for a journal article.  Feeding content to this blog has delayed progress on my book-length projects, but so far it has been worth it.

But now it’s time to revive one of those half-completed books, or several. 

Here’s where I think writers like Martin Grams and Jim Rosin were ahead of the curve.  Finally, I’m starting to get excited about the possibilities of self-publishing.  Amazon’s print-on-demand application is beginning to leveling the playing field between traditional publishers and one-man bands.  The Kindle and iPad offer cheaper and, arguably, more convenient platforms for reaching readers.  Pricing structures have been upended.  The publishing industry is scared of these changes, and while that has made it more difficult for esoteric writers like myself to get book deals, it has opened new possibilities, too.  Now you can self-publish without blowing your life savings on a garage full of unsold books.

Most of the digital self-publishing success stories are fiction writers, but I’m curious about what will happen with non-fiction books.  I still like reading novels on paper, but I’d sure love to have my shelf of reference books transferred to searchable files on my laptop.  Aren’t works of popular history a natural fit for digital delivery?  I’d shell out to repurchase key works as PDFs, or in a similar format.  The index would be obsolete! 

Of course, there is a danger here.  I’ve taken other self-published writers to task when I thought that aspects of their work were not up to a professional standard.  If a writer goes DIY, he or she has to know how to conceptualize, write, edit, proofread, index, design, upload, and market the work.  I can do some of those things pretty well, but not all of them.  Still, I’m excited by the prospect of doing an end-run around miserly publishers, mediocre editors, and the idiocy of peer review.  I believe that a new and more efficient path may be taking shape, by which specialists like myself can connect with a core audience that would not have been findable a short while ago – and without giving it all away for free.

I always welcome reader comments, but in this case I am particularly interested in feedback about what I have written here.  Have I been too critical of writers like Rosin and Grams?  Does the future of popular culture scholarship reside on the internet, in eBooks, or someplace else?  How can self-publishing writers compensate for the absence of editors, designers, and publicists – or will none of that matter in the near future? 

And.  Most important of all.  Would you buy a book from this guy?

An Interview With Tim O’Connor

The piercing eyes, the pockmarked cheeks, the steel-gray hair.  If you’re a casting director and you see Tim O’Connor’s angular visage glaring at you from the pages of your player’s directory, you’d cast him as a gangster.  Or an Air Force colonel who’s about to drop a lot of napalm on somebody.  Or a vindictive prosecutor, tearing into witnesses like a hawk rending a mouse. 

But if you happened to see O’Connor at work, you might use him differently.  His voice has a gravelly edge to match the face, but it is also softer than you expect.  Reassuring, even.  His smile is welcoming, when he lets it out, and his gait is looser than any predatory lawyer’s or napalming colonel’s would be.  He has a wistful quality, and he is more learned in his demeanor than the rough features would suggest.  O’Connor is a collection of intriguing contradictions, and he understands that those contradictions are valuable tools for an actor.

O’Connor first began to gain notice in the late fifties, in the New York-based series produced by David Susskind and Herbert Brodkin.  For Susskind, O’Connor played secondary roles in a series of videotaped superproductions, supporting an awesome array of marquee actors including Laurence Olivier, Edward G. Robinson, Jack Hawkins, Jessica Tandy, Maximilian Schell, George C. Scott, Vincent Price, and Boris Karloff.  For Brodkin, O’Connor usually played heavies.  He had a recurring role as a federal prosecutor in those episodes of The Defenders that dealt with military or national security issues, and played a memorably sadistic pimp to Inger Stevens’s “Party Girl” in an episode of The Nurses scripted by Larry Cohen.

So O’Connor played his share of villains, but gradually he broke out of that ghetto, to find his calling out as one of American television’s great everymen.  Early on, before he took off in television, O’Connor’s most important stage role had been in The Crucible.  He starred as John Proctor, Arthur Miller’s average man who is swept up and ultimately destroyed by the hysteria of history.  Variations on John Proctor, ordinary men bound up in ethical or psychological knots, became O’Connor’s specialty.  His first showy role in Hollywood was in The Fugitive’s “Taps For a Dead War,” a cliched story of a damaged war veteran, but O’Connor deepened the material by emphasizing the pitiable qualities that lay beneath Joe Gallop’s malevolence.

The following year, on Peyton Place, O’Connor created his most complex role.  He joined the show during its third month as Elliott Carson, a man unjustly imprisoned for murder and the lynchpin in several intricate, interlocking plotlines.  O’Connor’s skill alone won a reprieve for Elliott, who had been marked for death at the end of his initial story arc.  The series’ writers hit upon the clever idea of turning the local newspaper over to Elliott, so that he had a pulpit from which to evolve into the town’s conscience.  O’Connor played Elliott as a sage, a man with a new lease on life and a reason to exude optimism, but during the show’s long run neither he nor the writers neglected the subterranean well of resentment that Elliott nursed over his lost years in prison.  O’Connor’s flawless interweaving of these contradictory strands turned into perhaps the most satisfying exercise in character continuity on television during the sixties. 

A subsequent generation of TV fans will remember O’Connor as Dr. Elias Huer in 1979’s short-lived Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century, and an even later one may recall him as Doogie Howser, M. D.’s grandpa.  He still works today, on occasion.  But in this interview, O’Connor takes us back to his early days as an actor in live television and on Peyton Place, and shares his secret for creating multi-faceted characters in a medium that favored simplicity.

*

What was it that made you first start thinking about acting? Was it movies, plays?

Oh, it was movies.  Movies, particularly.  I don’t remember seeing any theater at all.   I came up on the South Side of Chicago, and I remember in eighth grade we had a drama teacher that was getting us together for a play.  She was encouraging me, and she felt good about it, I remember.  Then suddenly, we weren’t going to do it.  They probably ran out of money, or the production was going to be too expensive.  And I had a really good part, in a very talky play! 

But at that time, I never dreamt of being an actor.  I discovered it in the service as something that I would like to do, but I never dreamed that I ever would.  I thought I would become a lawyer.  But then I ran into an old schoolmate of mine and he said he was going to a radio school, and I still had some time on my G. I. Bill and it just hit me.  I said, Jesus, do it.  Go down and try.  So I went down to this radio school and signed up and started.  This school just taught radio acting, radio engineering, radio announcing.  But in three months, I had gone on to the Goodman Theater.  I got a scholarship there and finished that up, and then in the third year I started working in local television. 

What television shows do you remember doing in Chicago?  Were you ever on Studs’ Place?

I did work with Studs Terkel in, oh, three or four different locations.  He won an award for this show, on drugs seeping into the communities and kids getting hold of them, and I played a young man hooked on drugs who became a dealer. 

Another show he had that ran for a year was improvised.  He’d hire a couple of actors – and I was still in drama school doing this, my third year of drama school – and he would just give you a part and give you kind of what the scene was, and then you’d start making up lines about what was supposed to happen with your character.  That’s how we made up a script.  He jotted down lines, recorded lines, and then he gave the script to us at the end of three or four days, and we memorized it and shot the TV show. 

Then there was another show that was very good.  It too was improvised.  It was an hour show, and it was to do with law and trials.  The producer would hire real attorneys and get a real judge, a different one for every week’s show.  And then they would cast the rest of us as actors, and give us the premise, a general premise of who everybody was, what they had done, why they were here.  Then we would improvise this whole thing. 

I remember, I got so very good at this improvisation, that if there was something the show was lacking in, this particular producer-director would signal so that I could back out at a certain time, beyond the camera.  Somebody would tell me what I was to do, and then I’d get back on stage again.  Once  I just had to create a scene, because it was awfully dull, or he needed a little more time or something.  So I turned against my attorney when he had me on the stand, and then I jumped off the stand and leapt across the prosecutor’s table and at the prosecuting attorney, and slid across and crashed onto the floor.  They tossed me back, and the producer-director was down on the floor behind the cameraman.  He looked at me and he went: enough.  He had enough time.  And I went back to the [script].

What did you do after you left the Goodman Theater?

I did some summer stock in Chicago.  I did a film there, and then I went into a stock company that played summers in a community in the north side of Chicago, in Highland Park.  It was called the Tenthouse Theatre.  And also in Palm Springs, California, in the winter, so I did summer and winter stock for about three years, and then went to New York and began to work there Off-Broadway.   I guess it was about 1953.

Then somebody saw me and I picked something up on television, and then I didn’t have any time for the stage any more, except once in a while.  One year, the [New York] Journal-American had gone in and done some research to find out who was the most working actor in New York City, and it turned out to be me.  I never knew that they were doing this – they came to me and told me, and interviewed me.

Was there any particular show that represented a breakthrough for you?

Yes.  There was a fellow there, a big-time producer named David Susskind, who produced his own television series, and it was all classic shows.  He usually hired English actors to do the big one or two leads, and would then complement the rest of it with actors in New York.

These were essentially specials, broadcast on the DuPont Show of the Month or Family Classics series.

That was it.  These shows were taped, with a very early taping device.  They only had one in New York City, so that all these various shows had to take turns.  So you’d do a scene, and you’d tape it, and you’d want to redo it if something went wrong, but you had to wait.  Some other show was waiting in line, and then they’d get back to you and what you were doing.  That was it.  There was no editing anything at that time.

East Side / West Side, “The $5.98 Dress,” in which O’Connor played a pathetic (and sympathetic) heroin addict

Tell me about some of those roles in the Susskind adaptations.

I played Aramis in “The Three Musketeers.”  In “Billy Budd,” I played the next character that was just underneath [the villain Claggart], who was a violent person and who hated the captain, and helped Billy.  Eventually Billy kind of turned him to his side because Billy was so nice a guy.  I had violent, violent scenes that I provoked and carried off.   [I had to] swing around and throw myself at people, bring people down.  And work with knives.  It had all been worked out, and then of course the show begins and the energy is extraordinary.  I don’t know how some of us escaped being hurt!

Do you remember Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory”?

I remember that very well, yeah.  I had a death scene, and I died with Laurence Olivier there, tending me as I die.  Do you know that show?  It’s about a priest that’s in Mexico, and he’s running because the police are after him.  George C. Scott is the head of the police department after [Olivier], and he races and he gets out of the country to the States and escapes.  But then this guy, me, I play the Gringo.  I’m dying and I’m calling for a priest.  He’s just across the border and he hears that, and [despite] his fear of George C. Scott, he comes back anyway to attend my death, and to hear my confession.

I finished up that scene, and we were shooting and we were awfully late.  Sir Laurence was planning to be on the Queen Elizabeth on a certain day, two or three days later, and back to England.  By this time they had that new tape, so they were able to redo and redo scenes that they thought they could do better.  That was my last scene.  The stage manager dismissed me and off I went and I changed my clothes, and I was just about ready to leave and I hear this raging down on the stage.  I opened up my dressing room door and stepped out, and there was Sir Laurence, and boy, he was really pissed.  They had decided to redo my death scene.  They thought that there was something else that they thought they could do better, where they had missed a shot on it.  They told him that they were going to do it again, and he just raged: “I’m going to be on the Queen Elizabeth Sunday morning, and I don’t give a damn about any of this stuff!”  He’d had it.  He was probably exhausted, because he was in every scene. 

Another of your big videotaped shows was Playhouse 90’s “John Brown’s Raid,” with James Mason in the title role.

We went down to the location, of Harper’s Ferry, and shot it for ten days.  Sidney Lumet directed.  The last four days, there were some of us who worked day and night without stop.  The show got into real trouble, and the company didn’t want to pay us for playing twenty-four hours a day, four days!  So there was a big stink about that.  We had to go to the union about it and make some arrangement. 

The show then turned out so dark, that you could not tell the difference between the people who were white and the guys that were black.  It was just so funny.  But they broadcast it – they put it on!

Do you remember your first leading role in television?

The first one I got, the first really large part, was an Armstrong Circle Theater, when I played a guy making a breakout of Alcatraz.  This was a live show, and I did the lead as this guy who arranged this whole escape.  After the show the head of the U.S. penal system was to be interviewed for about two minutes, to speak on the subject about  nobody had ever escaped [from Alcatraz].  And what happened was that about two days before the show, somebody did escape, and they found his clothing underneath the San Francisco Bay Bridge.  They could not write him off as having been found, or that maybe a shark got him.  That’s what they always said, that nobody had ever been able to survive getting across that water to the mainland, but he did.  So we did the show, but the gentleman from the penal system did not appear for the interview.

That was late in 1962, and Armstrong was one of the last live shows still on the air.  Did you miss live TV, or had you come to prefer working on film?

Most actors, it’s the other way around, but I have always secretly preferred film. 

Why is that?  Because you had the opportunity to refine your performance, to do it over again until you were satisfied with it?

Yeah, you can do that, you can do them over again.  You have an opportunity of seeing downstream and back and forward, of where you’re going, and what you’d like to do in order to get there.  Also, I liked doing a job and completing it.  No matter how long I had to work, and how many hours – fifteen hours a day – there was an end to it.  It wasn’t in a year or so. 

I enjoyed the stage very much, but I ended up realizing that I preferred working in film and on television over working in a play, which kept you so busy for such a long period of time.  I think the longest run I ever had was nine months, when I did The Crucible Off-Broadway [in 1958-59].  I played the lead in it, John Proctor.  I replaced somebody [Michael Higgins] that had played it about six months, and then I left it and another actor came in. 

Around that time, you started commuting to Los Angeles to do a lot of television work.

Yes, I was spending a lot of time on airplanes, going back and forth to L.A.  What the heck is the name of that hotel, up north of Highland [the Hollywood Tower]?  That was the New York actors’ hotel.  That was where we all stayed.  George C. Scott had a reputation, and I don’t know if it was true or not, that he would go down and rip up the Sunday L. A. Times in the lobby, and throw it down and get back in the elevator and go upstairs.

I suspect that one of the early Hollywood parts that earned you some attention was your role as a disturbed Korean War veteran in your second episode of The Fugitive, “Taps For a Dead War.”

As soon as you mentioned The Fugitive, I thought of David Janssen.  We were out on location, it was at night, and we had a scene where he got into a fight with two or three of us.  We had marked out the fight, you know, stepped it out, bang, bang.  Of course, we were just crashing it up.  After the scene was over, he came over and says, trying to apologize, “I’m sorry I hit you so hard in the stomach.”  I said that I had not felt it.  David was sure that he had actually hit me, though.  He was a very nice guy. 

Another little story about David.  David and I and the director were talking, on another episode of that same series, and I said something, kiddingly, about David, to the director, that implied something derogatory, that he wasn’t terribly good in this particular scene.  It was so outrageous that I was obviously kidding.  And there was just a very brief pause, and David said to the director, “Who couldn’t we get?”   [As in,] I wasn’t selected because they wanted me, but because I was the only one left!

The Fugitive, “Taps For a Dead War”

When you got the regular role on Peyton Place, did you decide immediately that you would relocate to Los Angeles?

Yeah, I was making a commitment to stay out there.  I was travelling so much, back and forth, that I decided just to go and do it.  At that time, I had a house on an island in a lake in New Jersey. 

Really?

It just came up, and my wife and I decided that it sounded like a good idea.  We were apartment dwellers and always had been in New York, and this sounded great.  It was about an hour out of town, and a long bus ride.  I just loved it, the water, the summer and the winters.  In the winters we could walk across because it would be frozen.  It was our own island, a small island only large enough for one house.

Tell me about your character on Peyton Place, Elliot Carson, and your approach to the role.

Initially, as it came on, he was in prison and he was just being released, but he was not really guilty of what he was charged with.  He was a true blue kind of fellow who felt that what he found in terms of Allison and Constance, the love he felt there and that they felt back, and the family feeling that he had, put him in such a positive ground, that he was a force for good.  He was there for what he stood for, in the way he wrote his stories and how he ran the newspaper.  That was all sort of brought out with his father.  His father and he both worked at the newspaper, and had a lot of everyday conversation about what was happening in Peyton Place.  So the discussions were a great deal about self-improvement.  He was always kind of nagging himself that he could be better.

Elliot had a subtext of anger that was there at the root, and could begin to surface at any time.  He really had no in between.  His experience of the time he spent in the penitentiary, and his survival in the penitentiary, I think gave him a different sense of being.  Although he deeply appreciated where he was and understood what he had, and he did not want to lose it, he wasn’t a person to be bullied.  And a couple of shows did come up with that, where that was demonstrated.

You worked more with Dorothy Malone, who played your wife, than with anyone else in the case.  What do you remember about her?

I liked her.  She was nice, and she was a pro.  She’d come from films into this, and I think there was just this little bit of adjustment for her into television.  Dorothy had an Academy Award, and she was a very good actress.  I seemed to work well with her.  We didn’t have a great deal going between each other, but it wasn’t anything that was uncomfortable.

Did you and Dorothy Malone choose to leave the show in 1968?

No, we were written out.  They dropped the characters.  The problem, as I understood it, was ABC.  The cost of the show, after three and a half years or more, was going up and up and up.  ABC had a contract they wanted to stay with, and Twentieth [Century-Fox] was beginning to lose money on making the show, as popular as it was.  They looked downstream a ways, and just slowly began to release Dorothy and myself and others on the show, and change the format of the show.  And within a year it died, it was dead.

When Peyton Place went to three half-hours per week, Fox added a second unit, so that multiple episodes were shooting at the same time.  Did that make it more difficult?

We went back and forth, from whatever set to the next, whenever we were needed and whenever we were called.  It was really crazy, and very, very difficult to do.  We had to be on top of three scripts at a time.

Did you meet with the writers at all, or have any input into how your character was scripted?

No.  Maybe the other actors talked with them, but I liked what was done with [my character], and I just kept pushing it.  They seemed to write to the person that I thought this guy was.  And if I wanted to do something, I just simply did it, and took the dialogue that way, with me.

I remember the first scene that I had on the show.  I was in prison and I was talking through the bars.  I think it was to my father, [played by] Frank Ferguson.  We had this very long scene, which was this character’s introduction, and there were an awful lot of nuances in it.  The way it was written was one way.  The way I played it [was another].  I can’t remember which director shot it, but he was rather happy with what I did that he hadn’t seen, that element in it that I was introducing.  I smiled through it, teased it, and I would indicate just via looks that the character was so strained and had so much internal controversy. 

How would you describe the technique you developed as an actor?  Were you a Method actor, or in sync with those ideas?

I was probably somewhat in sync with that naturally, just because I never quite thought of myself as working any particular way except to know what I was talking about.  To know, thoroughly, the scene.  Once I began, I made the lines and the part my own, even though [there were also] ideas and attitudes that were not necessarily my own at all.  Which I suppose is part of the Actors Studio kind of thing.  

I remember, when I would begin, when I’d start and pick up a script I wouldn’t put it down until I knew it backwards.  I’d just work on it and nothing else mattered.  Sometimes, particularly with a play, I would walk around the script on the table, around and around it, because once I got involved I knew that I wouldn’t be doing anything else.  I would be be on it, and I wouldn’t put it down until I had mastered it.  I could remember it on the subway.  I mean, on the train, the Illinois Central that I would take from downtown Chicago out to the South Side where I lived, or on the street or walking to the theater, so many times I’d be talking the lines to myself.  I’d be on the train, looking out the window, and I’d be talking the lines.  Often the conductor would come up and be standing there looking at me, wondering what’s the matter with me. 

In Palm Springs, I can remember walking that mile or mile and a quarter out to the theater from town.  In the middle, there was a grocery store that was the only thing in that whole mile on both sides of the road going out to the theater.  Somebody said, “Stop!”  It was a policeman.  “Don’t move!  Don’t move!”  And across the street, in front of that store, was a police officer crouched down with a gun in his hand, aiming directly at me.  This is at night, and I’m in the reflection of the grocery store.  He came across very carefully, never taking that gun [off me].  “Put your hands where I can see them!”  And of course I did. 

I knew exactly what I’d done: I had been going through my lines and I must have been talking full blast in the dark, nobody around, and I’d got this cop into thinking I was crazy or something.  I told him who I was, and he put me in the car and drove me out to the theater.  And he believed me, or he would’ve taken me to the station.  But they were looking for somebody that was a little nuts, who had disappeared and had committed some crime.  This cop saw me walking down the road talking to myself, and he was sure I was who he was looking for.

Would you say that you were ever typecast, for instance, in authority figure roles – policemen, lawyers, military men?

Well, I never thought of it like that.  I just took whatever came along.  I never thought in terms of type.  I played so many different kinds of guys.

How would you approach an underwritten role, where your character was defined as little more than “the cop” or “the father” in a script?

I usually approached it within the same sort of fashion.  I would play it against what was written.  That’s in every part I’ve ever played, anyplace.  Particularly in episodic television: you get a character and you play against it.  That was my motto.  Even a strong part.  Even the bad guy.  It was usually written as a classically bad guy.  I would play against that, and be a smiling, charming guy, as much as I could.  Bad guys were bad guys unless you gave them a little twist somewhere.  Or good guys were good guys unless you gave them some kind of twist.  I might even be marked right at the beginning of the show, but they would have doubts.  I would try to give them doubts.

Banacek, “A Horse of a Different Color”