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

by MacLeod, Gavin

  When the song was over, he walked back into the recording booth to listen to the playback with the producer. He said, “I don’t like it. Let’s come back tomorrow and do something else.” To any one of us, it was the most beautiful recording we’d ever heard. But to him? It wasn’t quite right. He wasn’t satisfied. He was a perfectionist.

  That’s when Frank Jr. went over to his dad and said, “Look who I’ve got over here.”

  Frank Sinatra looked over, smiled, and started walking toward me. He said, “It’s great to meet you in person.” Then he hit me on the chest with his hand and said, “Kid, you’re a hell of an actor.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I said, “Mr. Sinatra, you’re a hell of a singer.”

  I introduced him to my secretary, Judy, and she just about slid down the wall. I don’t think I’ve ever come down from that moment. It was truly one of the great moments of my life, getting to shake that man’s hand and then getting a compliment from him.

  Some months later, Frank Jr. called and said, “My father’s going to be performing at the Universal Amphitheater. Do you want to go? I’ll take your daughter for a date.” My daughter Stephanie was single at that time. So we went. Sarah Vaughn opened for him that night. I remember her all dressed in chiffon, and it billowed in the wind. Sarah is one of Patti’s favorite singers of all time, and it was such a thrill to see her perform in person. Frank Jr. also invited Jonathan Winters and his wife. What a funny guy he was. He started breaking into comedy routines in the audience!

  We met Frank again before the show. When the show was over, he always left, right away. That was his routine, his son told us. But before the show, you could see him. So I met him and shook his hand once again, and this time Patti got to meet him too. It was great.

  Coincidentally, all these years later, Frank’s first wife, Nancy, has become one of my dearest friends, and their daughter, Nancy “These Boots Were Made for Walking” Junior, is my neighbor. She’s a friend and confidant. We park our cars right next to each other. I even live on Frank Sinatra Drive. I love them both. That’s life! (As Frank used to sing.)

  Frank Jr. later told me that his father wasn’t just being a nice guy when he gave me that compliment in the studio. Frank was a fan of my work, and he had been a fan long before The Love Boat came along. One of Frank’s favorite movies of all time was High Time, his son told me. “He loved the stuff you did!”

  It just goes to show that when you get out there and do what you love, and you do your best, you never know who’s watching. All those years I enjoyed listening to Frank Sinatra, I had no idea that he was out there watching my performances up on the big screen.

  The Love Boat was now airing in ninety countries around the world each week. And between Mary Tyler Moore, which had gone into syndication; The Love Boat, which repeated a couple times a week because it was so popular; and the various talk shows, game shows, and TV movies I was doing in between, Entertainment Today named me “the most visible star on television.” I was being seen on TV no fewer than thirteen hours per week! It was wild.

  Maybe it had something to do with being around all of these gigantic stars. Maybe all the fame and notoriety was going to my head, but I felt driven, sort of like I did back in the mid-1960s. I was working all the time. I never stopped. I was getting invited to do so many amazing things, and to meet so many incredible people, each day felt like a new adventure.

  Boy oh boy, I tell you, by that early part of the 1980s I felt like I was on top of the world.

  And wouldn’t you know it? That is precisely when I started to lose my way.

  19

  MAN OVERBOARD

  I NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT ACTUALLY TAKING A VACATION during our vacation breaks on The Love Boat. It never even occurred to me. I think a lot of other actors do that too. After years of trying, you finally find yourself in a situation where there’s ample opportunity to do the work you love, so you jump at every opportunity that comes up. In the beginning, I had the added bonus of getting to do so much of that work with Patti.

  We put another nightclub act together, just as we had in the early 1970s, and the excitement of putting that act together as a couple was great. It’s a very creative process to do something like that, working out the dances, choosing all the songs. To get to work on that kind of a thing with your wife? I loved every second of it! Doing our act together was like frosting on the cake of life.

  During the months when we were filming, though, I was hardly ever home. I’d be off doing the series all day, and Patti would wait during those months until we’d do shows together after all of my hectic shooting was over. That worked well for a good three years. But as we turned the corner into 1981, something started to change.

  We started the year off just fine. We had a nice anniversary dinner at Chasen’s, that famous celebrity restaurant in LA. We could hardly believe we were celebrating seven years together! Time was flying, and we were enjoying the fruits of my success. My parents never owned a home when I was growing up, and here I was with the opportunity to own multiple homes, and to keep trading up and up. I think I may have overcompensated!

  We moved into a sprawling condo overlooking the Pacific, at Ocean Towers in Santa Monica. Patti took on the bulk of the work in setting up each of our new homes, since I was so busy at work. And it started to feel like we were apart a lot. So much so that when we were together, it started to feel like it was all business: talking about what goes where, which plan had to be finished, what was happening next week, which friends we were having dinner with. Patti didn’t see me all day, so when I got home I felt like she was bombarding me with all kinds of questions and all kinds of orders. They weren’t “orders,” of course. She was just trying to keep track of the details and keep our household going. I know now that those questions were just her way of trying to connect with me. I didn’t appreciate that fact when I was in the middle of it.

  The sad, horrible truth of it was maybe I didn’t appreciate her.

  In my first marriage, when I was drinking, I would sometimes get in moods that I would describe as “nasty.” I was unhappy. I didn’t want to act that way, but I did. With Patti, it was different. She would get on me once in a while. I was working, working, working. I was more interested in my work than working on our marriage at that point, but it wasn’t a fighting situation. We didn’t hate each other. It was more a matter of priorities. I think because of the New Age thinking I had embraced, I kept putting all of my focus on myself—as if I were “number one.” When you embrace that sort of thing fully, sometimes all you think about is you.

  Once again I felt a longing for something more in my life, just as I had back in the late 1960s. I felt that tug, that pull, the feeling that something was missing—and I started to pin it all on my wife. I felt like Patti was nagging me, and because of that, I felt like I didn’t want to be around her very much. I want to be clear: as I look back on it, I don’t think that she was nagging me. It was this feeling that something was missing that was nagging at me. Patti was trying to love me. She was trying to connect with me. The only one to blame, truly, was me—because “me” was all I cared about.

  The chain of events that unfolded as we headed into the summer of 1981 is very difficult for me to look back on. I’m ashamed of my own behavior.

  Patti and I were planning to go on the road together in a summer-stock production of The Music Man, on the famed Kenley circuit in Ohio—where a cavalcade of great actors did summer stock over the years. Wouldn’t you know it? That spring, I broke my leg during a Love Boat cruise down in Australia. That changed everything. I would likely be out of my cast by the time the show started, but there was no way I could dance those parts and do all the movement that con-man Harold Hill has to do in The Music Man. The risk of reinjury was too high. So we backed out. I got offered another play, a murder mystery down in Florida where I wouldn’t have to sing or dance; I could just walk. And Patti picked up an offer of her own: to star opposite Ken Berry in a summer-st
ock production of George M for the same Kenley circuit.

  It was the first summer since we married that we didn’t spend together.

  I wonder sometimes if we had done The Music Man together if things would have turned out differently. I wonder how life might have played out if I hadn’t broken my leg. I don’t know about those things in life. All I know is that once I got down to Florida, my whole perspective on our marriage shifted, and shifted quickly.

  I rented a place on the beach. I took long walks with no one to rush back to. I could do whatever I wanted to do. I found I enjoyed operating on my own schedule. I enjoyed simply being alone in my own space. For the first time since I first got married at the age of twenty-four, I spent a few weeks not answering to anyone else—and it felt like heaven.

  That’s the selfish space I was in when I decided I wanted a divorce from Patti.

  I thought of that episode of The Love Boat, the flashback scene when the young Captain chose a life on the sea over the love of his life. It’s sort of what I was feeling in that moment, only instead of dedicating my life to the sea, I was dedicating myself to showbiz. I was giving myself to it. I didn’t want to share it anymore. I wanted it to just be mine. I thought it was time that I answered to no one.

  It’s easy to forget in life that we’re always answering to someone, isn’t it? How foolish we can be at times.

  Patti was shattered. She couldn’t believe it. It all happened so fast. She was blindsided. I still can’t believe I did that to her, out of my own selfishness.

  Of course, the tabloids had a field day. The National Enquirer had already been focused on the cast of The Love Boat in 1981, spreading false stories about arguments on the set, saying each of us actors was vying for bigger and better storylines. None of it was true. We got along well—and as the Captain, I set the tone. I took cues from Mary Tyler Moore about how a leader should act, and I always came to the set with a smile. I always arrived early. I made sure everyone was taken care of. I acted like the Captain of my show, and I swear to you, it was 99 percent smooth sailing on that set. But the Enquirer was relentless. They were determined to dig up dirt behind the scenes on this happy-go-lucky show.

  Well, guess what? They finally got what they wanted: a negative story about the Captain of The Love Boat. Stories pop up about you wherever you go in times like those. I would innocently walk through a lobby somewhere or go to some restaurant, and the next day my whereabouts were reported in the gossip columns. It was nuts. It’s easy to understand why some stars become paranoid. I never knew who was gonna dime me out!

  So Patti and I divorced. It was over. As far as I was concerned, there was no turning back. I barely even talked to her about it. We just split. It was all my decision.

  As the months went by, I dated some other women. No one serious. No one I thought about settling down with, that’s for sure. I wasn’t interested in settling. I wasn’t interested in sharing my life. I was interested in calling my shots, all on my own.

  The press told a different story.

  My friend Diane Ladd came on The Love Boat during that time period. (If you remember, we were in A Hatful of Rain together back in the late 1950s.) Diane had broken up with her husband, Bruce Dern, at that point, and her publicist put something in the papers claiming she and I were an item. “Reunited after all these years!” it said. It showed up in the Hollywood Reporter. Everybody believed it—even my mother. My mother was the type of person who says, “If it’s in the paper, it must be true.” I tell you, if it’s about Hollywood and it’s in the papers, you should take it with a grain of salt!

  Diane and I didn’t date. We were good friends. On the episode, I played the Captain’s brother, wearing a hairpiece and fake moustache, which was so much fun to play. It was just like the old days. That brother romanced Diane on the ship. It was acting. Nothing more.

  Back when we were in A Hatful of Rain in Boston, after the show I used to walk her across Boston Common at night so she could get to the nunnery where she was staying. That’s how it was in those days! We were in our twenties when we worked together. We started our careers together. There was no romance, but boy oh boy, it was nice to see her.

  During that same time period, Ruth Warwick came on the show. I don’t know how many people make the connection between the Ruth Warwick who was in Citizen Kane, considered by many critics to be the best film of all time, and the Ruth Warwick who was on the soap opera Days of Our Lives for many years. They were one in the same! She was fabulous no matter what she did. I was honored to work with her. But her publicist took one of our on-set pictures together and put it in The Examiner. The headline read, “Hot romance!”

  Ruth Warwick was old enough to be my mother!

  Years later she came to see me in a play in Cape Cod, and I asked her, “How did that thing get in the paper about you and I having an affair?!” She said, “Dahling, it was so wonderful!” She was one of those actresses who survived all that time by keeping her name alive. That was just the old Hollywood way of doing things, I suppose.

  Jessica Walter came on the show too. What a wonderful actress. I was a big fan of hers. She took over for country singer Tammy Wynette, who left before the shoot was finished. They got Jessica to come in and sing and everything else on short notice. I actually did take Jessica out a few times. In fact, we were photographed by Ron Galella, the celebrity paparazzo. He snapped me out and about with a couple of other women during that time too—women who weren’t actually “dates,” but just companions who joined me so I wouldn’t show up to red carpet events all alone. Agents and managers and publicists set up those sort of “dates” all the time. It’s good for the actors on both sides of the equation. Once you’re a celebrity, your whole life becomes part of the act!

  I found out pretty quickly that I wasn’t too keen on participating in the “act” for the sake of celebrity. It felt like lying. But more than that, it felt destructive to the parts of me that mattered most. Especially when the Enquirer kept calling Patti, and calling Rootie, and calling my kids. My daughter Meg, my youngest, would call me on the phone crying, “Daddy, they’re on the phone again. Why won’t they leave us alone?”

  Once it started, it seemed there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  I ignored as much of the tabloid press as I could, and I asked everyone I knew to ignore it too. I wouldn’t read the tabloids myself, but then someone would always talk about them whether you read them or not. It was a real nightmare, to tell you the truth. Remember, I was never in this to get famous. I just wanted to act. I was perfectly happy being out of print and on the stage.

  Perhaps that negative stuff that was happening all around me was a sign that something in my life needed to change. We bring misery upon ourselves when all that we’re focused on is ourselves. That seems obvious to me now, but I couldn’t see it then. I had spent half of my life married, always having someone else there. I just wanted to be “me.” I didn’t want to have to put someone else first, except for my children. I did want to spend more time with my kids, and for some reason I felt that not being married freed me up to do that like never before. I went on some really great camping trips with my son David, traveled to see my daughters, and hung out with Keith. It was wonderful to bond with them as they blossomed into adulthood.

  I was still just as busy with work, and busy living my life with gratitude whether it was on the stage, on the set, or out on the high seas on The Love Boat. I was just “happier” doing it on my own.

  After the split, I didn’t talk to Patti. At all. I never called her. Not even once. I didn’t want to call her.

  She stayed in our place in Santa Monica, in that high-rise overlooking the ocean. I went out and bought myself a huge house in Beverly Hills, thinking bigger is always better. I had the place beautifully decorated. I turned it into a real showplace—a home befitting the Captain on one of television’s biggest shows.

  And every night, I would go home to that big house. Alone.

  20


  THE LIFE BOAT

  IN THE SPRING OF 1982, I TRAVELED TO NEW YORK City to perform in the Night of 100 Stars, a big celebration of the one hundredth year of the Actors Fund. The whole show was happening on my old stomping grounds at Radio City Music Hall. It was great to get back there!

  Our daughter Stephanie was living in New York at the time, and I contacted her to let her know I’d be in town. She came over and visited with me for a while, and she told me something I didn’t quite understand. “Mom has really changed a lot,” she said. “She’s left the New Age teaching and become a Christian.” She said her mom was like a different person now. She thought I should give her a call.

  I listened, and I told her I’d think about it, but I knew I wasn’t gonna call Patti. I had already gone out on some dates with other women. I was so involved in my work. I was enjoying my time alone—and frankly, I just wasn’t interested.

  For the next two and a half years, I would go on living that same selfish life, putting on a smile, living out my dreams onstage, seemingly enjoying every minute of it. All I want to do is act! I kept telling myself. But that emptiness I felt, that hole in my life, that longing for something more—it never, ever went away.

  In September 1984, I learned that my mother had a cyst in her brain. It was the size of a baseball, they told me. If the doctors didn’t get it out, they were afraid they were going to lose her. As a result, they planned to operate right away. Yet the surgery itself was extremely risky, they said, and there was a chance—a very real chance—that she wouldn’t make it through surgery at all.

  My mother went into surgery on the morning of September 14 at a hospital in Palm Springs. She was staying with my brother at the time, and my brother and his wife had been taking care of her. I couldn’t get to the hospital. There wasn’t enough time to get there and back. I had to work. I had no option. For all the accommodations Aaron Spelling had made for my schedule on The Love Boat, all the juggling I had been able to pull off for the sake of my work in the theater, and on game shows, and talk shows and more—this surgery came up so suddenly that it was impossible for the producers to rearrange my schedule. Too many other people’s schedules were tied directly to my presence. I had to show up on that set, no matter what. I had no choice.