by Mike Rowe
Paid by Chic was led into the stable and brought to a pommel horse—a piece of gymnastic equipment whose name finally began to make sense. On the other side of the pommel horse, a mare in heat was waiting. Well accustomed to that daily dance, Paid by Chic was already… ready. My job was to approach the animal and guide his manhood—his horsehood, if you will—in all its vascular tumescence into an artificial vagina, thoughtfully presented to me by a veterinarian named Dr. Christine. The tumescence was humbling. The vagina was a bright blue container about the size of a bread box. Imagine a hot-water bottle with a heavy-duty fabric handle on the top. Dr. Christine handed me the device along with a tube of lubricant and a baby bottle.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Squeeze some lube into the artificial vagina.”
“How much?” I asked.
“Can’t have too much lube,” she said. “Now go ahead and screw that baby bottle into the back end.”
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
“Plug up the back end of the artificial vagina with the baby bottle so the semen has somewhere to go. Just go ahead and screw it in.”
In the long history of sentences I’d never heard before, that was another one. “Sooner would be better,” she added.
Over on the pommel horse, Paid by Chic had assumed a position of pure, undeniable readiness. His front legs were draped over the side. His eyes were focused on the mare just out of reach. His horsehood was thrusting, pointlessly, into midair.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m ready.”
I approached the engorged beast.
“Hold on there, champion. You don’t approach a horse in that condition without one of these. Last week, one of our best grooms got knocked unconscious.”
Occupied as my hands were with a fully lubricated artificial vagina, augmented with a semen-catching baby bottle, I couldn’t accept the yellow bicycle helmet Dr. Chris was offering me. I could only stand there, appalled, as she affixed it to my head. Like the velvet monstrosity from my youth, it didn’t fit, even remotely. But once again I was in compliance and ready for action.
Moments after the episode aired, Mom called to congratulate me.
“Oh, Michael, you’re so lucky! Paid by Chic is one of the greatest quarter horses alive! And you looked so handsome in your little bicycle helmet.”
“Thanks, Mom. The whole thing was… humbling.”
“Yes,” she said. “I imagine it was.”
I saw no need to mention that three minutes later, Paid by Chic had humbled me yet again with an encore performance. A performance that filled my baby bottle with another deposit of white gold. A performance worthy of all the close-ups, slow pans, and artistic dissolves that made Dirty Jobs the family-friendly show it was.
After all, she is my mother.
CAN YOU BE THERE BY NINE?
Al sat on the back of a horse that wasn’t his, drew a pistol that wasn’t loaded, and shot an Apache who wasn’t an Indian. The stuntman screamed and fell unconvincingly to the ground, and the director yelled, “Cut! Back to one, everybody! Let’s do it again!”
Al glanced nervously at his watch. 6:30 p.m. Not good. His audition was at nine the next morning—St. George, Utah, was seven hours from LA by car—and Al didn’t have a car.
“All right, everybody, here we go. Ready? And… action!”
Once again Indians whooped and charged, townspeople screamed and scattered, and Al pulled the trigger, shooting the same guy for the tenth time that day. But now, when the Apache who wasn’t an Indian fell to the ground, the director called, “Cut! That’s a wrap, everyone! Check your call times for tomorrow!”
Al knew his call time already: 3:00 p.m. Tight but doable. He turned his horse away from the set of Bullet for a Badman and rode hard toward the nearest highway. It was rough terrain, but he could handle a horse. You probably knew that, if you’d seen him in Springfield Rifle, with Gary Cooper, The Big Trees, with Kirk Douglas, or The True Story of Jesse James, with Robert Wagner. For a big man, he rode well.
Five miles later, as the sun was about to set, Al reached the highway. He dismounted, turned his horse back in the direction of the stables, and gave it a slap on the rump. One thing about horses: they always know where the stable is, especially around dinnertime. After that one left in a cloud of dust, Al knew that there was no turning back. He stuck his thumb out, and two hours later, an eighteen-wheeler finally pulled over.
“Where you headed, cowboy?”
“Los Angeles.”
“I can take you as far as Vegas.”
“I’ll take it,” said Al.
Al jumped into the cab. The truck driver said he looked familiar. Al asked him if he liked the movies.
“Sure,” said the driver. “Who doesn’t like the movies?”
“Did you see Dive Bomber, with Errol Flynn?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I was in that one.”
“Oh, yeah? What else you been in?”
“Well, I was in Up Periscope, with James Garner.”
“Didn’t see it.”
“Time Out for Rhythm, with Rudy Vallee?”
“Nope.”
“What about Rogue Cop, with Rod Taylor?”
“Sorry.”
“To the Shores of Tripoli, with Harry Morgan?”
“Negative.”
“The Sea Chase, with John Wayne?”
“Uh-uh.”
“The West Point Story, with James Cagney?”
“Doesn’t ring any bells.”
By the time they arrived in Vegas, it was firmly established that Al’s driver was not up to speed with his passenger’s résumé—but Al didn’t mind. With a wife at home and four kids to feed, Al didn’t care about being recognized. He just wanted to work. That’s why he was busting his butt for a chance to audition for the role of Jonas Grumby, the final character to be cast on a new show for CBS. His agent said he looked like a Jonas Grumby, and Al couldn’t disagree.
The driver dropped him at McCarran Field just in time to see the last flight to LA take off without him. Al slept in the terminal. The next morning, he boarded the first flight to Burbank, landing a half hour before his audition time, and grabbed a cab to the studio.
Al smiled when the cabbie picked up exactly where the truck driver had left off.
“You got one of those faces,” said the cabbie. “Where have I seen you?”
“I dunno,” said Al. “You like the movies?”
“Sure,” said the cabbie. “Who doesn’t like the movies?”
“Ever see Monsieur Beaucaire, with Bob Hope?”
“Don’t think so,” said the cabbie.
“I was in that one,” said Al.
“Oh, yeah? What else you been in?”
Al sighed.
“Home Town Story, with Marilyn Monroe?”
“Didn’t see it.”
“How about Battle Hymn, with Rock Hudson?”
“Not yet.”
“No Time for Love, with Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray?”
“It’s on my list.”
“Young at Heart, with Doris Day and Frank Sinatra?”
“Uh-uh.”
Al arrived at the studio with two minutes to spare. He didn’t look like a man who had ridden a horse, hitched a ride, and slept in an airport just for a chance to audition for a role he probably wouldn’t get. Nor did he look like a man who would be flying back to Utah in less than an hour to shoot some more Apaches who weren’t really Indians in another movie that no one would ever remember. He looked like a Jonas Grumby—the smiling, bumbling, exasperated character he’d come to read for.
Al glanced again at the lines, which he’d already memorized. He walked into the room. A skinny kid with a funny hat on was waiting in front of a camera. Al shook the kid’s hand, and they chatted briefly about the scene. Then somebody said, “Action!”
That was that. Magic. No one would ever look at Al again and wonder where they’d seen his face. Thanks to that audition and five decades
of syndication, Al’s face would be forever seared into America’s retina. Jonas Grumby would accumulate more screen time than all of the stars that Al had ever worked with combined.
And so when he died in 1990, Al’s ashes were sprinkled over the Pacific Ocean—a fitting send-off for the man who became synonymous not with the cowboys he’d so often portrayed or the Indians he’d so often shot but with Jonas Grumby—the sailor whose name was changed, after the show’s pilot, to the one you know today. The ubiquitous title by which he was called every day for the rest of his life.
Such was the fateful trip of Alan Hale, Jr., a great character actor who just happened to be an actor of great character. A man whose twelve-hour odyssey from St. George, Utah, to Los Angeles, California, earned him a three-hour tour to a deserted island that wasn’t really deserted. An island where he was known as “The Skipper.”
Even though the real boss was a skinny kid with a funny hat named… Gilligan.
* * *
Alan Hale, Jr., never won an Oscar or Emmy Award. He was never even nominated. But if Hollywood was in the business of recognizing character, surely there’d be a trophy somewhere with his name on it. Maybe even a statue. Because what Hale did back in 1964 was nothing short of heroic.
Imagine: You’re a middle-aged character actor. You’re not rich. You’ve got a wife and four kids, all of whom depend on you. In the middle of a paid gig in Utah, you sneak away on a horse that isn’t yours and make your way to Los Angeles, on the off chance that you’ll land a role you know nothing about. Then you get back to Utah in time to do the job you’ve already been hired to do.
Alan Hale, Jr., didn’t give a damn about fame. He believed in something far more noble, something Hollywood has never recognized and probably never will. He believed that a promise made was a debt unpaid; specifically, the promise he’d made to care and provide for his family. That’s what makes him a hero to me. And that’s why his journey reminds me of another voyage by another actor… a regular guy who taught social studies for thirty years, started a vocational training program at the junior high school where he worked, raised three boys on a single income, and appeared in fifty productions of better-than-average community theater.
The first time I saw my dad onstage was in 1975, when he played the lead in a production of Woody Allen’s Don’t Drink the Water. That character was Walter Hollander, a middle-aged American tourist trapped with his family at the US Embassy in a fictitious country somewhere behind the Iron Curtain.
I was transfixed. Who was this man inhabiting my father’s skin? Why was everyone laughing hysterically—not just at the things that he said but at the way he said them? Where was the no-nonsense teacher who’d come home every night and loom over me as I did homework? The stern taskmaster who woke me up every Saturday at 7:00 a.m. to split wood, mow the lawn, and shovel the snow?
Don’t Drink the Water split my father’s personality in two. He was still my father; still a dedicated teacher and church deacon; still the reliable head of our household. But every six months or so, he became an entirely new person: someone with bulging eyes and a funny accent. All that his wife and sons could do was watch the transformation, marvel, and take turns running lines with him.
I recall a production of Agatha Christie’s Towards Zero. Dad played a Scottish inspector called in to investigate a murder at a country estate. From the front row, I watched him confront the guilty party with damning evidence. The expression on his face was one I recognized immediately: It was an expression that accompanied countless other investigations, all conducted in the house I had grown up in.
“And whose muddy boots left this dirt on the carpet?”
“And who drank the last of the milk?”
“And whose socks are these, jammed into the sofa cushions?”
Such questions, directed to my brothers and me, were always accompanied with a raised eyebrow and followed by some dramatic revelation: the muddy boot, empty milk carton, or wayward sock, held high for all to see: “A-ha!”
As a sleuth, he was a natural. My father’s innate desire to get to the bottom of things informed his understanding of history and his desire to teach it to eighth graders as much as it drew him to plays that posed the question “Who done it?”: Dial M for Murder, Witness for the Prosecution, Twelve Angry Men, A Shot in the Dark, The Butler Did It, Deathtrap… Dad’s done them all. His portrayal of Judge Danforth in The Crucible comes back to me all the time.
“We burn a hot fire here; it melts down all concealment!”
Sitting in the front row at the Dundalk Community Theater, I was sure that his lines were directed at me—and seeing that there was more to my father than I had imagined made me wonder if, maybe, there was more to me? Mom certainly seemed to think so.
“One day, Michael, you’ll be the star of the show. Just like your father.”
If watching my dad was a privilege, working directly with him was an honor: a role you might say I was born for. In The Rainmaker, he played a sheriff who arrested me—for trying to convince desperate farmers I could make it rain during a drought. In Inherit the Wind, he played a judge (again) and threatened to send me to jail for contempt of court. That, too, was a very believable portrayal.
Seven years after Dad’s debut in Don’t Drink the Water, I appeared in a production of the same play. Not in the same role—I was still too young to play a middle-aged American tourist. I had auditioned for the part of Axel Magee, the hapless son of the US ambassador, who’d fallen in love with the beautiful daughter of Walter Hollander, the character my father had played.
The production was staged at the Cockpit in the Court—one of the more respected venues on the Baltimore theater scene. I had butterflies on opening night. I remember the audience murmuring on the other side of the curtain as the lights dimmed. But what I remember most clearly is Dad in the front row, laughing loudly in all the right spots, no doubt wondering “Who is this young man inhabiting my son’s skin and getting all of these laughs?”
Coincidentally (or maybe not?) my dad was back at the Cockpit in the Court while I was writing my story about Alan Hale, Jr., auditioning for a role in another production of… you guessed it, Don’t Drink the Water. Now that he was in his mid-eighties, he was too seasoned to play Walter Hollander. But thanks to a passable Russian accent and his no-nonsense demeanor, he did get cast in the role of Krojack, a KGB investigator determined to get to the bottom of things.
Watching from the front row, I thought about his many roles over the many years. All the rehearsing. All the time he’s spent memorizing lines. I thought about the hospital he volunteers at two days a week and the shut-ins who anticipate his cheerful delivery of Meals on Wheels every Monday. I thought about the former students who stay in touch with him and the church that still relies upon him to collect and count the weekly offering. And I thought about the three boys he’d raised on a single income.
After the show, he told me that things weren’t as easy as they used to be. But, as anyone who knows my dad understands, “easy” was never the point.
My guess is that Alan Hale, Jr., understood that as well.
A FULL-FIGURED GAL
Libby was a tall drink of water, no two ways about it. A statuesque, full-figured gal who was, in the words of Rodgers and Hammerstein, “broad where a broad should be broad.” Beyond her classic beauty, though, Libby possessed another quality that most men found irresistible—a quality that suggested anything might be possible with a girl like her.
Fred had conceived Libby twenty years earlier—her mom had never really been in the picture—but it would be unfair to call Fred a single parent. Fred loved his girl as much as any father could love a daughter, but it was Gus who had actually raised her. And now Fred and Gus were trying to arrange a marriage, searching the world for a man who would put their girl on a pedestal.
For a time, it seemed that that man would be the governor of Egypt. Isma’il Pasha was handsome, charming, and clearly enamored of Libby. He said all t
he right things and promised to build her a fabulous home, right there at the entrance of the newly completed Suez Canal. Fred was delighted. Obviously, Isma’il was Muslim, but Libby didn’t care about that. She’d wear the veil in public, if doing so would please him. But after two years of courtship, it became clear that Egypt was not the right place for a woman like Libby.
Libby took the rejection in stride, but Fred was beside himself. He had wasted two years with Isma’il, and his little girl wasn’t getting any younger. So Fred and Libby sailed to America, to find a more suitable suitor. To everyone’s surprise and delight, the mayor of Baltimore proposed. So did the mayors of Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. American mayors seemed to have a thing for full-bodied gals who radiated possibility. But ultimately it was a Hungarian immigrant who persuaded Fred that New York City was the only sensible place for his daughter to call home.
At first glance, Joe was not an obvious match. He was a slender man who’d been described as “too scrawny for manual labor.” Next to Libby, he looked like a kid. But Joe knew exactly what he liked and precisely how to get it. Back in Missouri, as a reporter for the St. Louis Post, he had worked hard and saved his money. Eventually, he’d bought the entire newspaper. He’d bought the St. Louis Dispatch, as well. Then he’d moved to Manhattan and bought a newspaper called The World. New York was where Joe first laid eyes on Fred’s daughter. That’s when he proclaimed—on the front page of his new newspaper—that Libby would stay in the city with him.
Fred was delighted. Obviously Joe was a foreigner, but Libby didn’t care about that. There was only one problem: when Fred told Joe that he and Gus wanted to see Libby on a pedestal, he wasn’t talking in metaphors; he was talking about an actual pedestal—one that would cost the city of New York no less than $250,000. That’s the equivalent of $6 million today.
Sadly, Joe didn’t have that kind of cash lying around. But Joe was a man who knew exactly what he liked, and precisely how to get it. So, 150 years before crowdfunding became a thing, the journalist from Hungary turned his newspaper into a GoFundMe page and challenged his readers to keep Libby in New York City.