Billion Dollar Batman

by Bruce Scivally

  Looking back on the film, screenwriter Lorenzo Semple, Jr. said, “It was not terribly well done, if I may say. The movie, they were trying to make on the cheap. At that time, studios were making so-called features of series, like there was one called The Man From U.N.C.L.E., I remember. What they really did was take a few episodes and kind of patched them together with a little connective tissue and call that a feature. The Batman feature was entirely new, but nobody went to it particularly. They didn’t realize it was something completely new. They thought it would probably be some recycled old junk.”297 Burt Ward blamed Semple, not the marketing or the budget, saying, “I wish they had put more effort into the script, so it wouldn’t have been just a giant TV show. I would have loved to do a first-rate, top-notch Batman feature. But Dozier and Fox just hurried the picture, to knock out a movie. It was too rushed and didn’t have the stature of a real film. It should have been much better.”298 In retrospect, the lackluster performance of the Batman film may have been the first indication that the Batboom was waning. As the second season began, there were also signs Batman was losing steam overseas. Variety reported that the series had been taken off the air in Switzerland and Holland, and that in a survey of Tokyo school children, it ranked second among least-liked programs, behind Popeye. Dozier remained optimistic, however, saying, “It’s a big hit in Ireland. Different countries have different reactions, but generally the show is doing very well.”299 Just as the film was opening, Ed Graham, the producer who had tried to do a live-action Batman for CBS’s Saturday morning line-up, filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court seeking $7,500,000 in damages. Graham alleged that his contract with National Periodical Publications had been an exclusive one, which the publisher breached by making a deal with ABC-TV to produce the Batman TV show.300 This was not the only legal action the producers had to deal with; at the beginning of May, Shirley Louise Smith filed suit in Los Angeles’s Superior Court asking for an injunction restraining the use of the title Batman on the TV series. Smith claimed ownership as successor-in-interest to a painting titled The Batman, and alleged that the painting had been submitted to Bob Kane by its previous owner prior to 1939, when he created the iconic comic book character. Kane, according to the suit, had agreed to pay the previous owner if he used the title.301 Since there are no other mentions of these cases in newspapers, it is likely that they were dismissed.

  DISQUIET ON THE SET

  Adam West and Burt Ward returned to the 20th Century Fox soundstages to face another new villain—Ma Parker, played by stage and screen dynamo Shelly Winters. A Supporting Actress Oscar winner for 1959’s The Diary of Anne Frank and 1965’s A Patch of Blue, Winters took the role to placate her daughter. “I was on some kind of a panel show with Bill Dozier and some others and afterward he asked if I’d like to play a villainess for Batman sometime,” she told Los Angeles Times reporter Hal Humphrey. “I said, ‘Sure, when I’m in Hollywood and have the time.’ The next thing I know he’s mailed me a script. My 13-year-old daughter, Vittoria, opened it and pleaded with me to do it because she likes the show and does her higher calculus homework while she’s watching—these kids! So the next thing I know I’m dressed up as Ma Perkins or Parker or somebody, wearing hand grenades in my hair and shooting a machine gun. We didn’t even get to read the script or rehearse before shooting. No wonder that Adam West and Burt Ward look about dead. You hardly have time to eat lunch.” Winters, known for being outspoken, said, “Somebody is going to get killed on that set. They don’t even observe minimum safety regulations. I slipped in a puddle of water left over from some stunt and turned my ankle. You’d think that show was a flop the way they try to save 20 cents here and 20 cents there. I still don’t get it. I thought this show was a big success. They wanted my stand-in to get in a jet-propelled wheelchair and crash through a wall, but offered her only $40. I told her she was nuts to do it for less than $100. They paid her the $100, but she had to crash three times. And everybody’s so serious. I like to joke around, like one morning Batman and Robin were strapped in electric chairs. I went up and tickled them, just as a gag, and yelled, ‘All right, this morning we’ll play Batman, but this afternoon you’ve gotta play doctor.’ You know what happened? Some guy, who’ll remain nameless, said, quite seriously, ‘No, Shelley, doctors are out now—that was last year.’ I mean, really.”302

  The next second-season villain introduced was the Clock King, a character who had originally menaced the Green Arrow in comic books. During the two-parter, Batman and Robin were trapped inside giant hourglasses and left to be buried in the sand. Oversized props like the giant hourglasses were the hallmark of the Batman comic books written by Bill Finger, so it’s no surprise that Finger was one of the writers of those episodes, along with his frequent scriptwriting collaborator Charles Sinclair. Finger was reportedly put off by having to do rewrites based on notes not only from producers William Dozier and Howie Horwitz but also from the story editors and the network.303 The Clock King was played by Viennese actor Walter Slezak, an actor best remembered as the U-boat engineer in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944).

  Egghead, another character created expressly for the series, made his first appearance in a pair of episodes written by Stanley Ralph Ross from a story by Ed Self. “That was based on a one-page story by the son of the studio boss,” said Ross. “All it said was ‘The world’s smartest comedian.’ There was no plot or anything, so I devised the plot and his manner of speech.”304 Identified by his bulbous bald head, white suit, egg-shaped gas bombs and penchant for using egg puns (“egg- zactly,” “egg-cellent,” etc.), Egghead was a great genius with an even greater ego. The role was played to perfection by horror icon Vincent Price, who was known as a connoisseur of art as well as an actor. “I was amazed at the dedicated attention to the production in every detail,” said Price. “My make-up as Egghead was supervised by Dozier himself and created by a master make-up artist, Ben Nye. My costumes were a triumph of camp, done by Jan Kemp. But the real surprise came in the inventiveness of the sets as imagined by the art director, Serge Krizman.”305 Writer Stanley Ralph Ross said that of all the Batman episodes he wrote, these Egghead shows were the ones he wrote the fastest. “The Writers Guild was going on strike Monday at noon, and I got the assignment on Friday. They said, ‘Stanley, we need a script by Monday.’ So, I wrote the whole script over a weekend! I started out by going to a dictionary and looking up every word that began with ‘Ecc-,’ ‘Eg-,’ ‘or ‘Ex-,’ and they became ‘Egg-splosive,’ ‘Egg-centric,’ or ‘Egg-zactly.’ I had 72 words and I must have used 68 of them.”306

  Piano impresario Liberace was up next, as ivory-tinkling villain Chandell, who unfortunately didn’t make a very credible villain. As Adam West wrote, “Lee at his most dastardly had a friendly twinkle in his eye which gave away the sweetheart inside.”307 He was so nice, in fact, that during lunch breaks he would sit at the piano and entertain the cast and crew with impromptu concerts.

  When Mr. Freeze returned to the show, the icy villain was no longer played by George Sanders but rather by famed producer-director Otto Preminger. When first approached, Preminger had declined. “Bill Dozier wrote me about being a villain on the show,” Preminger said, “but I felt I was much too busy.”308 He changed his mind at the insistence of his 5-1/2-year-old twins, Mark and Victoria. “They’re crazy about the program, and I like it too, strangely enough,” said Preminger. “When Mr. William Dozier, who’s now my boss, asked me if I would be interested in the part and I told the children, they wouldn’t leave me alone until I accepted.”309 As a director, Preminger had a formidable reputation as a bullying taskmaster. When New York Times reporter George Gent asked him if he had seen the Mr. Freeze script, Preminger roared, “Do you think I would accept the role without first reading the script?”310 Once on the set, Preminger showed director George Waggner—who had produced and directed the 1941 horror classic The Wolf Man and produced The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)—what a r
eal monster was like. For once, Adam West and Burt Ward didn’t have to act—the animosity they felt toward their guest villain was genuine. “I couldn’t wait to get rid of our second Mr. Freeze,” wrote West, adding, “the man insisted on enhancing his reputation as one of the meanest bastards who ever walked a soundstage.”311 When the episodes were in the can, Preminger was canned, as well. “Mr. Dozier did not offer me an option to return,” said Preminger. “Come to think of it, I should be hurt.”312

  While filming those episodes, just a week after Shelley Winters’ pronouncements about the unsafe conditions on the Batman set were published in The Los Angeles Times, Burt Ward was injured by an explosion that left him with severe powder burns. He was lucky it didn’t do more damage. “I sensed that a particular charge was going to be highly dangerous,” said Ward. “I closed my eyes just in time for the cue for the explosion. It’s a good thing I did, because I was knocked down by the impact. Instead of going up, the explosion blew outwards. I had second and third degree burns on my face and arms.”313 He was treated at Culver City Medical Center and returned to work later in the day.314 “The doctor said that if my eyes had been open, I would have been blind,” said Ward.315

  Mr. Freeze reappeared later in the season, and was played by yet another actor, Eli Wallach. “Eli Wallach phoned me up,” said William Dozier. “He said he was a flop with his grandchildren because he’d never been on Batman.”316 An esteemed character actor, Wallach had just returned from Italy, where he co-starred with Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). In his autobiography The Good, the Bad and Me: In My Anecdotage, Wallach wrote, “The most fan mail I ever got for anything I’ve ever done was for an appearance as Mr. Freeze on the TV series Batman. I was the villain of the episode, and I spoke with a heavy German accent—‘I vill freeze zee whole vorld! I vill conquer every country!’ I felt like a haughty Hitler.”317

  Marsha, Queen of Diamonds, was one of the less memorable Batman villains. A jewel thief, she used love darts to make men become enamored of her. The role was originally intended for Zsa Zsa Gabor, but instead went to Carolyn Jones, a Texas- born actress who had won fame as Morticia on the 1964-1966 TV series The Addams Family. In 1964, Jones had ended her first marriage to another actor, whom she had encouraged to give up the profession and turn to writing and producing instead; his name was Aaron Spelling.

  Another Stanley Ralph Ross creation was the dull-witted cowboy villain, Shame, portrayed by Cliff Robertson. Robertson was approached for a role on Batman before the character had been written. “I do remember the producers making several phone calls ahead of time, saying, ‘What kind of character would you like to play?’ I said it might be fun to play a very, very, very dumb cowboy, who took himself very, very seriously. Then they decided to do a takeoff of Shane. That is how they came up with the name Shame. I recall they kind of let me pick my own costume, and I did a lot of my own stunts.”318 Before scripting the Shame episode, writer Stanley Ralph Ross did some digging. “I bought a book of Western clichés from the University of Oklahoma,” he said. “It gave me every Western cliché, and I put all of them into the script.”319

  A pair of Catwoman episodes that aired in December featured the pop singing duo Chad and Jeremy, whose voices were stolen by the Catwoman’s Voice Eraser. Also appearing was celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring as “Seymour Oceanbring,” proprietor of Mr. Oceanbring’s Salon for Men. Sebring’s real-life celebrity clients included Frank Sinatra, Bobby Darin, Howie Horwitz and William Dozier. In a time when most men still wore a Brylcreamed pompadour, Sebring introduced a looser style, with the hair combed forward and what Sebring called a “casual part,” meaning you couldn’t see the scalp. With his signature style catching on and being copied all over television, Sebring decided to debut a new style on Batman. “You will see by mine that the hair will be longer and looser, a little more flamboyant or tossed,” Sebring said. “It might be called a ‘modified mod’ style, similar to Bobby Kennedy’s, except I would give him a much better haircut. His hair lengths aren’t even.”320 Sadly, three years later, on the evening of August 9, 1969, Sebring was murdered along with Sharon Tate and two others by followers of Charles Manson.

  The Batman juggernaut had a way of winning over the unlikeliest of converts. Shakespearean actor Maurice Evans, who remarked in the 1950s, “Our job is to lead public taste, not play to what is thought to be public taste,” took the role of the Puzzler for a couple of second-season Batman episodes. At the time, Evans was making frequent appearances on another ABC series, Bewitched, as the father of suburban witch Samantha Stevens. “Although I have artistic pretensions,” Evans told Hal Humphrey of The Los Angeles Times, “I also have no intention of winding up starving in an attic. Y’know, people forget that Shakespeare wrote some bad plays, too. At any rate, if you want to be remembered, you’ve got to be in movies or on TV. Only my family writes to me to say, ‘How dare you!’ but later I send them a fat Christmas present, and there is no more criticism.”321 These episodes were originally written with the Riddler as the villain, but with Frank Gorshin unavailable, they were re-tooled first with a new villain named Mr. Conundrum, and then changed to the Puzzler. The Puzzler first appeared as a Superman nemesis in Action Comics #49 in June 1942.

  Michael Rennie, best known for playing spaceman Klaatu in the original The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), was Batman’s next guest villain, portraying the Sandman, a part originally scheduled for Robert Morley.322 The Sandman turned out to be another weak second season villain, even though he was aided in the episodes by Julie Newmar’s Catwoman.

  After appearing in the first season episodes and Batman feature film, Frank Gorshin became more in-demand than ever on the nightclub circuit. “What this has done to my career is unbelievable,” he told Norma Lee Browning of The Chicago Tribune. “My night club price has tripled. I’m getting all kinds of offers. Now that I’m the Riddler I’m ‘in.’ I’m no more talented than I was before. But the Riddler has given my name importance. It has been a fantastic boost to my career...For the first time in my life I’m on The Dean Martin Show. You can’t knock that...Batman is becoming a way of life. It’s new, bizarre, and successful. People watch it because the ‘in’ thing is to watch something that’s very successful.”323

  Gorshin’s success was not necessarily good for the show, however. After having one Riddler episode rewritten for another villain, when Gorshin’s nightclub bookings kept him unavailable, the producers recast his role. John Astin, who had just finished two years as the star of The Addams Family, was offered the part, and accepted. Speaking to Paul Henniger of The Los Angeles Times, Astin said, “You know, people forget that I’ve done Shaw, Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill. This is what I’ve been reveling in since the Addams series went off. After doing Oliver and Rattle of a Simple Man I was asked by writer friends, why not do some TV guestings? I’ve since done six covering a wide range of roles.”324 When he was offered the Batman script, Astin was intrigued by what would cause someone to become a villain strutting around in green tights. “I had very little knowledge of how Gorshin played the role,” he said. “I figure the guy’s got to be in love with himself—a narcissist. I play him this way. You know, striding around. Striking a few muscle poses. It was fun.”325 Fun for Astin, perhaps, but for the show’s loyal fans, he was no Frank Gorshin.

  Portly Brooklyn-born character actor Roger C. Carmel popped up as Colonel Gumm, who threatened to make life-size postage stamps out of Batman and Robin, in episodes that also pitted the Dynamic Duo against the Green Hornet and Kato. It was a blatant effort to juice up the ratings of The Green Hornet series, but the more serious style of The Green Hornet simply didn’t mix well with the humor of Batman, and Colonel Gumm was yet another lackluster villain.

  Before the season ended with episodes featuring the Joker and Mr. Freeze, legendary actress Tallulah Bankhead came aboard as the last of the second season’s originally-created villains, the Black Widow. Bankhead appeared on Bat
man at the invitation of William Dozier. “We worked together when times were good,” said Bankhead. “We did the Lucille Ball Show, General Electric Theater and Schlitz Playhouse.” She told Walt Dutton of The Los Angeles Times that the reason she accepted the role was because, “It’s camp—and I’ve been using that word since I was 15—that’s why. I have a great friend, a fine artist who watches Batman, and he’s 47 years old.” Speaking to Norma Lee Browning of The Chicago Tribune, Bankhead said the Batman crew was “doing everything to make me comfortable, the dahlings, treating me like a baby. Joan Blondell’s niece is doing my hair and I’m wearing this black Mod suit with pants and riding around in a motorcycle sidecar. I’m a black widow bank robber and it’s all very high camp but you know how it is with these TV camera close-ups, making me look like Grandma Moses’ grandma. Someone told me they had to shoot Shirley Temple through gauze so I told them in that case they had better shoot me through linoleum.”326 Her appearance as the Black Widow was her last on-screen role.

  With so many lackluster villains, not to mention the formulaic nature of the plots, Batman’s ratings began to falter in the second season. In the final two weeks of October, 1966, less than two months into the season, the Thursday night episodes of Batman were finishing in the bottom of the top 40 programs for the week—quite a drop from the show’s debut ten months earlier, when it was in the top ten. The Wednesday night episodes fared even worse, finishing 60th during one rating period and 62nd during another. Part of the slide had to do with the shows Batman competed against. On Wednesdays, it was scheduled opposite The Virginian on NBC and Lost in Space on CBS, which began broadcasting in color that season. On Thursdays, it was up against Daniel Boone on NBC and the World War II espionage series Jericho on CBS.327 But part of the problem, too, was that viewers figured out that the Wednesday night episodes were just the build-up to the Thursday night shows, and since the action of the Wednesday night shows was recapped at the beginning of the next night’s episode—the episode that had most of the action—why did anyone need to watch it on Wednesday?