“Don’t smoke grass, Sally,” he said. “You’re going to be a singer.”
That was his big message. I don’t know what prompted his concern. After all, I was still so painfully square. Maybe he was seeing more people he knew doing drugs. He knew I had seen that too, especially in jazz. Grass, heroin. I was around those scenes, but I was just looking. It was so different from the world I’d grown up in. But it was the music that I loved. Maybe he wanted to protect me. But what came through loud and clear was that he cared, even if he had no reason to worry. At twenty-one, I didn’t smoke grass, drink, or make love. Not yet, anyway.
TOMMY HAD BEEN MISSING A LITTLE WHILE WHEN I FIRST heard about it. Someone called me up to say that Tom hadn’t been seen since Halloween. He had gone to a party in Benedict Canyon, and no one had heard from him since he left. Soon after, the police called, referencing Tom, and asked me to meet them at the Renaissance, a club at the corner of Sunset and Olive, where the House of Blues is now. I knew the spot—I had gone to see Stan Getz play there. I didn’t give it a second thought that they didn’t ask me to come down to the station; I had never met with the police before, and all I knew was that I wanted to do whatever I could to help Tom.
The meeting started off pleasant enough. There were two men, and the questions at first were very general. How did I know Tom, when was the last time I’d seen Tom—that sort of thing. It felt more like a conversation than an interrogation. At the time Tom was working on the film Verboten with Samuel Fuller, a well-respected director. One of the men mentioned this and said that they thought perhaps Tom’s disappearance was merely a publicity stunt. I disagreed; Tom would never pull something like that.
“So where do you think he might be?” they asked.
“He’s probably in Mexico sitting on the beach with Sheree North,” I said. Sheree was a wonderful actress and Tom’s good friend.
“Well, we just want to be sure,” they said. The meeting came to a close shortly after that, and I went home.
I didn’t want to think about anything bad happening to Tom. He was always off on some adventure. Mexico. He was definitely in Mexico.
I was a little worried now but thought there must have been a simple answer. I told Luana but not anyone else that I remember. I was sure I’d hear from Tom. I soon got another call from the police. Could they please meet with me once more, they asked. This time they wanted to meet at Googie’s.
This meeting felt very different from the get-go. The same two men, only this time they were playing Good Cop–Bad Cop. First they asked me if I knew whether Tom smoked marijuana. Even though most everyone I knew did smoke, it still wasn’t the kind of thing you discussed openly. Smoking grass was not tolerated in any way in the 1950s and was definitely the kind of activity you pulled the shades down for, still something that sent you running to the toilet if the police were called to quiet down your party.
Now I was uncomfortable. No matter what I knew, I didn’t want to say anything. I fidgeted. I said I didn’t know. I felt like I was in an episode of Dragnet.
Now the other guy—the one I kept thinking about as the “Good Cop”—said his name was Bob Bice.
“I was Tom’s best friend,” he said.
Huh? I’d never heard of this guy from Tom or anyone else. What was going on?
Then all of a sudden, Bad Cop turned on me.
“Because of you, young lady, he’s probably lying dead somewhere in a ditch!”
I felt my throat tighten, and I felt sick.
“What kind of monkey does he have on his back?!” Bad Cop yelled.
“Sure, he gets high, who doesn’t?!” I cried. “But he doesn’t have any monkey on his back.”
They finally left me. I was scared. There was no way Tom could have been involved in anything bad. Not Tom.
The next thing I heard about Tom was that they had found him. He was dead.
I was heartbroken.
By the time the police found him, Tom had been missing about nineteen days. The day after my second meeting at Googie’s, they finally took the helicopters up to scour the canyon to see what they could find. An officer found a damaged guardrail on one of the many sharp curves in Benedict Canyon, and there, partially hidden by the brush at the bottom of a 150-foot ravine, was Tom’s Porsche Spyder. His body was thrown halfway out of his car, crushed by the steering column. A guardrail was sticking through the windshield. The police found grass in his car.
I SAW BOB BICE ONCE MORE AFTER THE MEETING AT GOOGIE’S. He asked me to come to what he called his office, somewhere in the Valley. There he told me more about his close friendship with Tom and that he had also been listening in on Tom’s phone calls. He told me things that Tom had supposedly said about me, about how much I meant to him and how much he cared about me.
“I know every time he tried to get close to you,” Bob added, “you hurt him.”
I didn’t know how to respond. Then Bob said Tom was gay and that he was having an affair with photographer Bill Claxton, and that Tom was addicted to heroin. I refused to believe any of it. As far as I knew, Bill was dating Peggy Moffitt, lovely Peggy, a beautiful, wide-eyed, fair-skinned model. Bill and Peggy were both friends of Tom’s.
If Tom had been gay or a heroin addict, I was sure I would have known, I thought. I would have been able to tell. Tom surely would have told me—we didn’t keep secrets. Were these two men just lying to me? Trying to scare me into telling them something bad about Tom? Was it possible that Tom had been in trouble and I really didn’t know?
Now, because of the way Tom felt about me, this Bob Bice said Tom wanted him to take care of me. It all sounded crazy. I left and hoped I’d never see him again.
Everyone from the Sunset Boulevard crowd was at the funeral. Sam Fuller, Tom’s director on Verboten, got up to speak. “Some people say death is a blessing,” he began. “In this case it isn’t.”
News of Tom’s death made the papers across the country. “Rising Actor Meets Fate of James Dean,” the Milwaukee Journal stated. The paper called him “moody” and wrote of his love of “souped-up” cars. The article talked about how everyone thought he was going to be the Next Big Thing.
Not long after the funeral, Tom’s father, a small unimposing Norwegian man, came into Chez Paulette. He walked up and introduced himself to me.
“I know Tommy loved you very much,” he said. I didn’t know what to say. Tom’s father had been a radio and television actor, but as far as I could tell, the two were never close. But Tom’s father believed that if the police had chosen to spend the money and the time, Tom would have been found much sooner and would have survived.
I was at my parents’ house the day that the subpoena arrived in the mail. It turns out that Tom’s father was suing the Los Angeles Police Department for not acting sooner on his missing-persons report. I was in knots. I knew they were going to bring up the drug issue again. In those days marijuana use was a serious offense.
My friend Morgan came with me to the courthouse, along with Burt Shonberg, the painter from Chez Paulette. I sat and listened as officers and others gave their testimony about when this or that happened. They talked about the night Tom died and how they had found marijuana in his car.
When I was called to the stand, I stood, shaking, and made my way to the front of the courtroom.
“Is it true you knew Tom Pittman was smoking grass?”
Scared to death, I lied: “No, I didn’t.”
That’s it. I thought to myself. It’s over. I’m going right to jail.
Next they called Bob Bice to the stand. It had begun to sink in that he wasn’t who he said he was. I still didn’t believe he was Tom’s friend.
“And when did you first hear about Tom Pittman smoking grass?” they asked Bice.
“From Sally Kellerman,” he answered.
Shit! I thought. They called me back to the stand and asked me the same question. Again, I denied knowing anything about Tom smoking grass. I was sure I would be hauled off in irons.
I wasn’t, but the worst wasn’t over. My name and picture landed in the paper, where I was described as a “part-time waitress and actress.” At least that part was accurate, but the rumors that soon followed were not. People started saying that I had ratted Tom out, spilled information about his life to the police. Some people stopped talking to me. I didn’t find out until many years later that Alan Putterman, a regular at the Chez Paulette, had told everyone that I had stabbed Tom in the back. My true friends—Luana, Jack, Morgan—never changed toward me. And Burt Shonberg, the painter, was always so friendly no matter what anyone said. He was never one to go along with the crowd.
It was an incredibly painful time for me. Tom’s death epitomized those “rebel” years in Hollywood: the disdain the straight culture had for drugs, sex, and what so many of our parents and authority figures considered the so-called “fast” life. Not only had I lost one of my best friends, but I had become persona non grata in many people’s eyes. I hated that people saw me as some sort of stoolie.
“He told me to take care of you,” Bob had said that day we met. I didn’t want to be taken care of—at least not by Bob, whom I soon learned was an actor, just like the rest of us. The next time I saw him was as a bus driver in a Greyhound commercial. What his relationship with Tommy really was, I’ll never know.
TOM’S DEATH INDIRECTLY BROUGHT ON ANOTHER DIFFICULT loss. My friend Luana had been my heart and soul. I used to tell her that I loved her so much that I worried I was a lesbian and questioned whether she loved me as much as I loved her.
“It took you until Tommy died for you to realize how much he loved you,” she told me. “Are you going to take that long to know that I love you?”
She left a note on my apartment door, the same apartment where we would hide in the closet to rehash the day’s adventures: I don’t know how many other ways to prove I love you, so I’m going away.
I thought my little heart would break.
She wasn’t gone altogether; she had work in other parts of the country and was leaving town. I knew we were still dear friends. But everything was different when Luana wasn’t there. She was my confidante, my best friend.
Losing first Tom and then Luana—I was heartbroken. Thank God for the friends who kept me entertained and dragged me out of bed to auditions. Therapy would not have been enough to keep depression at bay. I went to class, where I felt safe. Even when other actors moved on from Jeff’s, I stayed.
Tom was so young, so lovely, and his career was just taking off. Not since Vicky died had the death of someone close to me been so shocking and devastating, something that made me question the order of things in the world. Wasn’t he God’s perfect child? I certainly thought so.
Back at home my father seemed to ignore the tragic aspects of the news story featuring my testimony in court. He cut my picture out of the local paper, framing it and placing it on his dresser. One day, not long after the picture ran, I was walking into my parents’ house as the housekeeper was leaving. She ran up to me, beaming and very excited.
“Oh! I saw your picture in the paper!” she said. “What were you singing?”
CHAPTER 5
Pushing the Limits
GOING TO AUDITIONS FINALLY STARTED TO PAY OFF. I SCORED a bit part in a film as a corpse and another as a prostitute in Machine Gun Kelly, directed by my friend Roger Corman. It became clear to me that, to feel less depressed, I needed better jobs and I needed to get laid. Both started to happen in the 1960s. In both realms the results were mixed.
Bob Sampson was one of the guys who kept me from sleeping all day. I adored Bob, and he always knew how to enjoy himself. He went on to do a ton of television, including Twilight Zone and movies like Dark Side of the Moon. To me, he was not only a partner in crime but also my first accompanist outside of high school. I still sang every chance I got and would occasionally get up the chutzpah to sing a tune in a piano bar during an open mic. But I wasn’t ready to venture out as a solo act. I liked my acting cocoon, where I could practice my work in front of other performers. Still, I loved when Bob would come over and play the piano for me. He played everything in the key of C and never fussed if I kept him waiting for two hours while I combed my hair. We would sing and play a while, and then we would head out for adventure.
Music was in the clubs, acting was in the classes, and fun was in the coffeehouses, at the beach, and on Olvera Street in downtown LA—if only I could get up and out to see it. Bob and I went to the movies at the Apollo and ate too much popcorn. We rode bicycles built for two in Griffith Park and huddled in sleeping bags on Venice Beach at night. If you tried that today, you’d have your throat slit. But back then we were the only ones there! We had Los Angeles all to ourselves. We goofed around in the train station, wandered down Olvera Street—then blissfully free of tourists—looking at sombreros and eating the best taquitos in the world.
I still saw Morgan Ames, of course. We often hung out in after-hours jazz clubs. If my poor mother only knew. I also spent time with Greta Chi, the tall, beautiful Eurasian actress who was my new roommate. I don’t remember how Greta and I found each other, but we had a wonderful apartment on Sweetzer in a Spanish-style building. It was a two bedroom with its own balcony, which we shared with another darling woman, an actress named Diana Spencer.
I saw my parents as well, sometimes going over for a meal. My sister Diana was back in Los Angeles now after working in both Washington, DC, and Paris. She was living near the beach with her husband, Ian Graham, whom she’d met while working at the Rand Corporation. Ian was quiet and older than Diana but seemed kind and shared her love of travel. They went to Europe; they played paddle tennis.
Diana’s marriage was a bit of a surprise, not because her husband was older but because she had confided something she was struggling with: her attraction to and affairs with other women. I was so touched she thought to share something so personal with me. I don’t know whether she had told my mother. If she had, Mom never said a word.
It is hard enough being gay in this day and age, but in the 1950s and 1960s there was little or no tolerance of homosexuality. Back then people viewed it, at best, as a mental illness or, worse, as a dangerous perversion. Sodomy laws in most states made homosexuals subject to harassment and arrest. No one entertained the possibility that someone could be born gay, which is what I believe.
So most gay people did what Diana did: married members of the opposite sex and tried to live “normal” lives, all the while pushing their feelings deep down inside, as far as they could, in the hope they would simply disappear.
Diana and I had grown closer over the years. She had written me a letter once, while she was working overseas, apologizing for not being more supportive when I went to her wondering if I should have my first sexual experience with Eddie Byrnes. She didn’t have to do that, so I wonder now if her own struggles were surfacing then. We had grown closer still since her wedding. I remember that when I visited her and Ian’s apartment, she would ask me things like how to walk in heels and how to move around in dresses. She wanted things to work out with Ian, and I wanted to support whatever choice she was making. We had come a long way as sisters, “Dinky and Stinky,” and as friends.
WORK IMPROVED IN FITS AND STARTS. A COUPLE YEARS EARLIER I’d made my stage debut in Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy of the People. (Not to put down my first film role in Reform School Girl, in which I’d acted alongside my darling Luana and my first boyfriend, Eddie Byrnes—well, maybe not alongside, as I had two lines, whereas Luana was one of the leads. I was big and butch, and when I came on screen, everyone laughed.) I believed then—and still do—that plays are critical for helping an actress grow. The film’s director, John Marley, hired me for Enemy right out of Chez Paulette. That, and the fact I’d been studying acting for years and now felt ready, had emboldened me to try to get an agent.
Today so many of the kids coming to LA get an agent immediately and then see what work they can land. But back then it was different—lea
rning to act was your first priority. Only if you worked and studied and got proficient at the craft would you have a long career. Not that you can’t get lucky and land a reality show these days, but chances are that won’t sustain you in the long run.
Luana advised me to lie when I starting talking to agents, telling them that I had done summer stock. So I went to the Paul Kohner Agency for a meeting and coolly mentioned that I had done “summer stock.” Naturally, the agent I was meeting with asked me which summer stock I had done. Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought about what summer stock I was going to be lying about. Luckily for me, he got an important phone call and ended the meeting abruptly. Needless to say, I didn’t sign with Paul Kohner.
Enemy, which we performed at the Civic Playhouse on La Cienega, had won me my first real review: Although her fresh beauty was a delight to the eyes, her wooden portrayal left so much to be desired that she should get out of the business.
Fantastic. This, of course, was the opposite of what I’d always thought: that I was talented but unattractive. Yet somehow this review—and not my imaginary summer stock experience—finally landed me an agent. Progress!
That didn’t mean I got any better at auditions. In an effort to land a bit part on some television series looking for a “sexy” girl, I went to an audition on the Warner Brothers lot with a head full of teased hair and a bra stuffed full of toilet paper. Standing around, waiting for my turn to go in, I was tucking and poking at my tissue boobs. Yeah, baby, sexy!
The director took one look at me and said, “Not only are you not sexy, but you’re like a cowering little mouse, and I can see your toilet paper.”
Totally deflated, I left. On my way out I ran into writer and producer Jerry Davis, who worked on shows like Bewitched and The Odd Couple.
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