This Is Your Captain Speaking: My Fantastic Voyage Through Hollywood, Faith & Life

by MacLeod, Gavin

  Come to think of it, even four or five years later, that bald noggin of mine was directly responsible for my first guest role on The Dick Van Dyke Show, in an episode called “Emperor Carlotta’s Necklace”—which would mark the first time I’d work with Mary Tyler Moore. I got the part of Mel’s cousin (Mel was Dick’s producer on the show), simply because I had a bald head just like actor Richard Deacon’s! That’s what got me the part.

  It’s funny, but in music, they say sometimes a player’s flaws become his “style” once he hits it big. It’s kind of the same thing in acting, or in comedy, or in lots of jobs. That thing that makes you different from everyone else just might be the thing that sets you apart in the best way possible. But you’ve gotta embrace it.

  The fact that my career was buzzing along in 1957 was great, but I would never forget that it came after years of hardship and struggle. It was a valuable lesson, actually. I’d have to call on that success-after-struggle memory again and again in order to keep my head on straight and to keep a positive outlook on my life and career. Especially once I settled into the sometimes-awful business behind the glittery facade the rest of the world sees as “Hollywood.”

  6

  THE ELEVATOR GOES UP . . .

  AS I MENTIONED IN THE PREFACE, IN THEATER, you work, you don’t work, you work, you don’t work. It’s a cycle you learn to live with and make the best of. It’s no different in Hollywood. And like lots of actors in my generation will tell you, the key to survival in those days was the unemployment office. If you were out of work for even a couple of weeks, you’d go and they’d help you. Everybody went.

  I was at the unemployment office in Hollywood one time and I saw Adolphe Menjou, one of the best character actors of all time, whose career went all the way back to the silent era. A guy you’d recognize from The Sheik, A Farewell to Arms, or A Star Is Born! His chauffeur drove him up. He got out of the car and went inside to get in line for unemployment. Why? Because he was out of work, and unemployment was a part of the gig in those days. I saw Herbert Marshall there one day. Herbert Marshall, who played opposite Bette Davis in The Little Foxes and everything else! (He had a wooden leg. Nobody knew.) I used to love to go to unemployment because I’d see these people I wanted to be like, and I’d say to myself, “Gee, they’re really human! They’re just like the rest of us!”

  Although I was working quite a bit, none of those little roles I picked up paid very much. Not even the really exciting ones. So unemployment was the saving grace between the highs of getting gigs and the lows when the phone wasn’t ringing.

  As I rolled into 1958, I would come to experience those ups and downs in ever-widening swings.

  On the upside, I landed a part in my first major motion picture: I Want to Live!, starring the gorgeous and talented Susan Hayward—from The Snows of Kilimanjaro and I’ll Cry Tomorrow and so many other great films. I almost got to play her husband, except I had the hairpiece on when I read for it. She thought I looked too young for her!

  Robert Wise was the director. He had already established himself as one of Hollywood’s most talented and prolific artists, with The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the just-completed Run Silent Run Deep. He would go on to direct West Side Story and The Sound of Music and so many classic films. What an honor to get to read for a guy like that! And he liked my reading, so even though I didn’t get the part I was after, he said there was a small part he wanted me to do instead. He cast me as a police lieutenant, and I geared myself up for a big interrogation scene where I’d have to pull Susan Hayward’s hair.

  I had a friend back then who claimed to know a lot about things, even though he never worked as an actor. He read all the gossip columns and knew people and heard things. When I told him about the part, he said, “You gotta pull her hair? Oh, man. I heard she can be a pain in the you-know-what. You’d better be careful pulling her hair.”

  When the shoot started, we spent all day on that one scene. When we got to the part where I had to pull her hair, I couldn’t get that friend’s advice out of my head. I pulled Susan’s hair very gently—as gently as I could while trying to look like a tough guy trying to get answers about a murder. Bob Wise did a lot of takes then, so we did it over and over again. I probably wouldn’t have pulled her hair hard even if I wasn’t spooked by my friend’s advice. I didn’t want to hurt her. It’s Susan Hayward!

  At one point, Susan said, “Can I talk to you?” She pulled me aside and said, “You know, there’s a rumor that I could get an Oscar for this. It would really help me if you would really yank my hair.” I respected women too much. I had never yanked on anyone’s hair before—even my own, which I didn’t have. “I’ll do the best I can!” I said.

  So we did the scene again, and this time I yanked it. Hard. She threw coffee on me in a spontaneous reaction. Bob loved it! We printed the scene.

  Nine months later: “The best actress award goes to . . . Susan Hayward!” I was thrilled as I sat at home with my wife watching the Oscars on TV. I helped her get that award! I still hated doing it to her, but what an honor!

  What people forget is that after shooting my little part for a day on that film, I would go back home. I might not get a call for a while. I’d be back in the unemployment line. It was up and down, up and down, all the time. And the wildest up-and-down ride of them all came for me on that one day in 1958, when I rented a car and bought a new sweater to wear for my big first day on a brand-new pilot for a sitcom with Hal March.

  I already described that day in the preface to this book, so I won’t repeat it here. I’ll just say that going from thinking you’re on a television pilot as a regular character—I was set to play Hal’s director pal, like a John Frankenheimer character who was always trying to get him to do this or that—with one of the biggest television stars of the era, to getting fired within an hour of my arrival, rattled me to my core. Acting was all I knew how to do. To get fired from an acting job shook the very foundation of who I thought I was as a human being.

  I thank God it turned around so quickly. I thank God my agent called me that very afternoon and sent me over to see Blake Edwards. I based so much of my self-worth and happiness on my work in those days, who knows what would have happened to me had I been left to my own devices and wound up in the unemployment line again after being fired? I really can’t stand to think about it.

  What I didn’t realize at the time was how much the casting director for the Hal March pilot really liked me. He would wind up casting me later in Perry Mason and all kinds of other TV parts. I couldn’t see the potential for any of that in the darkness of that moment.

  At the time, I never could have imagined that Blake Edwards would rewrite a part, just for me, in his pilot for Peter Gunn. I never could have imagined that Peter Gunn would get picked up and that a few weeks later I’d have my wife on my arm as we attended the screening with Craig Stevens, who played Peter Gunn; his wife, Alexis Smith; and Lola Albright, who played his love interest; and everybody in the show.

  I couldn’t see the positive in all the negativity of getting fired. I wish I could have. I wish I could have known! I didn’t have a true faith in God then. I didn’t trust in anything other than my ability to act. Without faith, the darkness sure seems a lot darker.

  Cut to just a month or so later, when I was at Universal Studios to pick up a script for another TV series called Steve Canyon. As I was walking on the lot, a car stopped—it was Blake Edwards! I said, “How are you!?” He said, “I was just talking about you this morning. I’m doing a new movie and I want you to be in it.” He told me to come over to the producer’s office right then and there, so I walked across the lot and met the producer, and Blake started telling him all about me, doing a big sell. Finally he turned to me and said, “I want you to play this character Hunkle; he’s the yeoman.”

  I said, “What’s he like?”

  “Well, he’s kind of a schlub.”

  I said, “That’s nothing like my character in Peter Gunn.”


  And Blake said, “No, but you can do this. I see you doing this.” How and why he took a shine to me, and saw things in me, I will never know.

  So we made a deal, and suddenly I was off on a plane to Key West, Florida, to start work on my second feature film: Operation Petticoat, starring Cary Grant and Tony Curtis. I mean, come on! Cary Grant! Oh, to look like him for ten minutes. Tony was brilliant and funny. But Cary Grant was a real movie star, in the biggest sense. And here I was in a film with him!

  We all worked together in Key West for a couple of months, and then we came back and finished the rest of the movie on the Universal lot. And guess who else worked on that film? Marion Ross. She had a small part as a nurse. If you really watch her, you can see that she played that whole part seasick. She’s truly a brilliant actress.

  Anyway, for all of the wonderful memories, and the big deal about getting to work with Cary Grant, the thing I probably remember most vividly about that film was filming the scene where we had to steal a pig.

  It was nighttime (we were shooting night for night, which wasn’t always the case in those days), and I’ve never been good with wild animals. Tony wasn’t exactly comfortable either, and we were supposed to jump into a pig pen, steal a pig, and somehow get it up into the front seat of the truck we were driving, where it would sit right between us. The two of us had the worst time trying to grab one of those beasts!

  Blake said, “Oh, we’re going to be here until one o’clock in the morning!”

  Some of that stuff gets improvised, of course, because you just don’t know how it’s gonna go. So we got into the pig pen you see in the movie, and Tony said, “You get him, Hunkle. You get him!” I said, “You’re the star. You get him!”

  Well, Tony Curtis finally got ahold of one of ’em by the back legs, and he walked him like a wheelbarrow. Then he said, “Put him in the truck!” And I had to wrap my arms around the pig and lift it up into the truck—and that pig was so scared it started defecating all over everything. Oh, the stench!

  I haven’t eaten pork since.

  That’s the unvarnished truth, folks. That’s the “glamour” of Hollywood in a nutshell.

  Operation Petticoat would go on to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Screenplay, and Blake Edwards would bring me back again to work on his projects repeatedly over the next decade. As I’ve already mentioned, I did another episode of Peter Gunn for him. In the 1960s, he brought me back for High Time, The Party, and Mr. Lucky for TV. And I tell you, Mr. Lucky is how I felt. Blake and I just grooved, man. We had fun. We had a fantastic professional relationship that I cherished. I loved him.

  7

  CONNECTIONS

  HOT ON THE HEELS OF MY SECOND FEATURE film, I went in to read for another major motion picture: Pork Chop Hill, starring Gregory Peck, and directed by the legendary Lewis Milestone—the director of All Quiet on the Western Front.

  The part I auditioned for was that of a young soldier. I knew that if I went in bald I wouldn’t get the part. So I wore my hairpiece. Think about that: what soldier in real life wears a hairpiece? It doesn’t make any sense! So I did the only thing I could: I never let them know. I wore my trusty secondhand hairpiece when I first went to see them, and I got the part, and I wore it every day on set—no one ever saw me without it. So Mr. Peck didn’t know, Mr. Milestone didn’t know, and it’s there on film for all eternity now—me in my hairpiece as a young soldier on the battlefields of the Korean War.

  All the big parts in that film went to actors who were represented by the William Morris Agency. But to get a chance to work with Lewis Milestone—just to be in the presence of that man—I would have taken any part. Turns out there were three parts to choose from. Milestone had storyboards in his office, and in one I could see there was a soldier character who got his foot blown off. The drawing showed the soldier’s foot in the foreground while the rest of him was still moving around in agony in the background. I said to myself, “He’s the only one who loses his foot in the movie? That’s the part I want to play.” My thinking was, People will remember me for that! This is a black-and-white war movie. The audience might not remember a soldier who gets hurt or killed under normal circumstances . . . but this?

  I always wanted my characters to leave a memorable impression.

  So I got the role, and when we were shooting the part where my foot gets blown off, I did one more thing to try to get myself noticed: I added a line. I had my character cry out, “Mama!” As an actor, I tried to put myself into that position, to imagine what it would feel like. I thought back to when you’re a little kid and things happen, and you instinctively call for your mama. It was just one word, but Mr. Milestone liked it, and it stayed in the film.

  There was another scene in that film where I got to work side by side with Mr. Peck. We were shooting somewhere in Thousand Oaks, and the two of us were positioned under a truck, waiting for the scene to start. There was a fire burning, and we were wearing fatigues, and I told Mr. Peck that I had heard a story about him back when I worked as an usher at Radio City Music Hall. “The story is that you were a tour guide next door at NBC, and one day you were fed up, so you took a whole group of tourists down to the basement, to the boiler room under the building. You then told them, ‘The next tour guide will be along any moment to continue your tour,’ and you left them there. The legend is that you then went to your locker, changed your clothes, flew to California, and became a big movie star!”

  He laughed and laughed. “Well,” he said, “that’s a good story, but there’s no truth in it.” Then he said, “But I’ll tell you something. You know what I did do when I went to New York to get started? I modeled men’s underwear in the Sears and Roebuck catalog.” Gregory Peck, an underwear model. I could hardly believe it! But I heard it with my own ears.

  I’m sure there are stories like that tour-guide story floating around about me out there. When you make it big, people always want to spread stories. The key is to laugh at them. And if a star as big as Gregory Peck could laugh at them, I certainly knew I could too. Stardom certainly has a strange set of downsides and pressures. Laughter and levity are so important. And what a gentleman he was to listen to my story and to share that kind of truth and camaraderie on a set when, comparatively speaking, I was a nobody! I would never forget that.

  As the 1950s came to a close and we headed into the 1960s, my career seemed to be on an upward trajectory that couldn’t be stopped. From the bit parts I’d started out with, I quickly settled into costarring film roles and top-billed guest appearances on TV. My highs got higher, and my lows got higher too! Everything just picked up steam.

  After working in those big motion pictures, I sort of graduated to the next level. I worked with legends such as Milton Berle—Uncle Miltie himself—on a Dick Powell Theater episode. (Mr. Berle would wind up doing a couple of episodes of The Love Boat many years later, and we reminisced about these days over lunch. He was in his nineties then. What a long, memorable career he had!)

  Mr. Berle was nominated for awards for that Dick Powell episode, called “Doyle Against the House.” I remember I was sitting there ready to go to work on the first day, and he came in the room and said, “Are you the doctor?” I said, “No, I’m just an actor.” “Oh, I’m looking for the doctor.” Holy cow! Milton Berle just spoke to me! I thought. I didn’t care that he had no idea who I was. I wound up having all these scenes with him, playing Arnie the Geek, a guy who dealt against the house so they beat him up and crippled his hands so he could be a symbol of what happens when you deal against the house. Those were the sort of juicy roles I was getting! And there were so many stars I was fortunate to work with. I shot Blake Edwards’s High Time during this period and had that moment where I got to dance with Bing Crosby.

  In fact, I was on the set of High Time when I saw Marilyn Monroe again. It was such a thrill. We were shooting on the Twentieth Century Fox lot, and I knew Marilyn was doing Let’s Make Love, with Yves Montand. I had just gotten my makeup done and st
arted walking down to the soundstage—ironically, the same soundstage where we started The Love Boat years later—and a limousine went by with the windows down. And there was Marilyn Monroe. The movie Marilyn Monroe, with the beauty mark. My friend Whitey Snyder designed that look for her. He was a makeup artist who did a lot of Blake Edwards’s films too. I remember watching her go by and thinking, What a difference. I met the real Marilyn. She was humble and sweet. And this is “the star.”

  I tell you, seeing someone like Marilyn Monroe on the lot—oh, and John Wayne, who I also saw coming out of makeup one day—sure makes you feel like you’re onto something big. These weren’t just stars; these were legends. And there I was in the thick of it, man. It was great!

  My personal life was on the upswing too: Rootie got pregnant again. I was finally going to be a father. We were so happy.

  There was just one thing missing in my life, and I was sure I knew what it was: applause. I had been so focused on doing television and film work, I had neglected my first love. As rewarding as it is to play those juicy roles in front of the camera, there is nothing like working in front of a live audience. I needed that. I needed to hear the sound that resonates from my heart to my head to my toes. And in 1960, a role came my way like no other. A role that would be remembered by many people in the industry for the rest of my career.

  Our son Keith was born just before I got back onstage in an avantgarde play called The Connection. Finally I was a father, filled with this newfound joy that you just can’t understand until you hold your child in your very own arms. I never heard the words “I love you” from my own father, and I think I overcompensated with Keith, and all of my kids, right out of the womb. I held them and told them I loved them and kissed them, and promised to always be there for them. I would never allow myself to become like my own father. I promised myself that.