One day Bill took me to the MGM commissary for lunch and showed me Spencer Tracy’s and Katharine Hepburn’s old parking spots. I thought I’d faint. “There was a time when I could just walk through the front door of this place,” he told me, his voice tinged with sadness. Which, in hindsight, was definitely an indication that this man might not be the answer to my prayers.
We did a bunch of meetings – I remember waiting for an answer on a Kirk Douglas movie – and he got me to do a screen test over at 20th Century Fox with Debbie Reynolds for a new TV series she wanted to do, produced by Jess Oppenheimer, who was a key player in the phenomenal success of I Love Lucy. Debbie was auditioning actors to play her husband, and while we were waiting for them to finish lighting the set, she told me that they were shooting the notorious Gore Vidal novel Myra Breckinridge on the same lot, with Raquel Welch and John Huston and Rex Reed, and that they had constructed a special dressing room for Mae West.
“C’mon, Gordon,” she insisted, “we’ve got to see that dressing room.” So off we went, and found it easily, two sound stages away. Debbie was thrilled, because she was genuinely fascinated by Hollywood history, even back then. And then we did the screen test, which seemed to go all right, and she said, “How do you feel about doing a series, Gordon?”
“Well, to be honest,” I said, “I just came off one, so I don’t know if I want to go back to one so soon.”
Suddenly the air seemed to get a bit cooler, and I was going to say more, to explain that I’d really come to Hollywood to do feature films; but I had to stop, because I was giving Bill Barnes a heart attack. And I liked him too much for that.
Up on Mulholland Drive my indefatigable Charm had worked her magic with our house in Sherman Oaks. I was not a great swimmer, but I loved having a swimming pool. Wasn’t that what Hollywood was all about? Sunshine and swimming pools and California bungalows perched precariously on the sides of sunburned, brush-covered hills, overlooking stone canyons and lush green valleys. Oh yes, the hills were alive, all right, but not with music. With Charles Manson and his disciples and whoever else had become unhinged by this crazy life around them. And you didn’t have far to go down the hill to get to 10050 Cielo Drive and the house Doris Day’s son Terry Melcher had rented with his girlfriend, Edgar Bergen’s actress daughter Candice. Manson had a grudge against Melcher, but unknown to Manson and his followers, Melcher and Bergen had moved to another location and the landlord had rented the house to director Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate. A horrible nightmare of a night. And right after that, the LaBiancas – they lived on Waverly Drive, and the Manson tribe had killed them the next night – and you had the awful feeling that these people, and other people like them, were crawling through your neighbourhoods in the middle of the night, and that no one was safe. And right away, before we even really knew who they were, the iron gates went up everywhere, new security systems were installed, and attack guard dogs were the order of the day.
I was working on Dan August with a seasoned Hollywood veteran, Richard Anderson, and Richard invited Charm and me to dinner at his place. After work I picked Charm up at our new house.
“Do they live very far away?” she asked me. Going to a friend’s house for dinner in Los Angeles would often involve a forty-five-minute drive.
“No, just down the hill,” I replied. “We’ll be there in less than five minutes.”
“Well, that’s handy!” she said, laughing. I didn’t tell her that Richard and his then-wife Katharine lived on Cielo Drive.
The episode of Dan August that I shot with Richard and Burt Reynolds was called “Epitaph for a Swinger.” Burt was pretty excited about having his own series – he had just come off Gunsmoke, where he played the blacksmith – and did most of his own stunts, which made him one of the most respected players in Hollywood. Film crews loved him, because he took as much pride in his work as they did in theirs. Burt was still under contract to Universal, and so was Julie Adams, who was a regular on the series. On one lunch break the three of us were walking along, and he had been asking about me and Canada. Julie, who had sort of a schoolteacher-ish thing about her, was between us, and Burt was being naughty, because he loved to tease her.
“Gordon,” he said, “you must get a lot of fan mail in Canada!”
“Yes, a fair bit,” I said.
“In Canada,” he said, “what do the girls send you in the mail? … nice things?” Julie shot him a don’t-go-there look, and he shrugged. “I just want to see if it’s the same as the stuff they send me.”
A minute later we went into a store where he insisted on buying each of us a copy of Screw magazine. “Here’s one for you, Gordon. Here’s one for you, Julie. Everyone should have a copy of Screw magazine.”
Burt was good. I was amazed at his athletic ability. He did superb work. He was chasing me, and I was going upstairs, then running across a corridor, and he did a running, jumping, flying leap over boxes, onto other boxes, onto the ledge and railing and climbed up and dealt with me. There is that thrill that the actor gets, if the actor can be that athletic, because it comes under the heading of showing off, and showing the crew and everybody else around you that you are right for this job. And he was marvellous. I played the villain in that episode of Dan August, and after we wrapped he sent me a note:
Gordon, you’re a terrific actor.
Just don’t forget to pick up
the latest copy of Screw magazine!
Some jobs were boring. Some were downright discouraging. When I got hired to do an episode of The Young Lawyers, I was in awe of Lee J. Cobb. But then, who wouldn’t be? He had done it all, on stage, on film, on television. Studio One. Playhouse 90. On the Waterfront. Twelve Angry Men. The Brothers Karamazov. Exodus. He was the original Willy Loman when Death of a Salesman opened on Broadway in 1949; Arthur Miller said he had written the role with Cobb in mind. On Young Lawyers he played an attorney named David Barrett, and when we weren’t shooting I don’t remember ever seeing him smile once. He walked around the set like he was slumming, like he’d somehow mistakenly taken this giant step down, and had not landed where he believed he should have.
When they say there are only seven scripts in the world, they must have been referring to those days in Hollywood, because every show looked the same. All the series that were being turned out looked the same – trashier, in various ways, but the same.
I played a German general with Bob Crane in Hogan’s Heroes. “Sitzen sie!” That was all the German I was required to learn. “Sitzen sie!” The series was on its last legs; they had only one more episode to go. I had scenes with Bob Crane and of course with Werner Klemperer, who played the POW camp commandant Colonel Klink. What a strange fellow he was. Before he was cast in Hogan’s Heroes he was regarded principally as a serious actor. Onscreen he had worked for Hitchcock and Stanley Kramer, and even played Adolf Eichmann. But he became famous playing a bumbling coward on television.
While we were shooting my episode, 20th Century Fox was hosting a big premiere for The Poseidon Adventure, and during a break I remember hearing Bob Crane on the phone – “So you’ve got the tickets, great, yes, I can be ready for a seven o’clock pickup.”
Klemperer heard him too, and was going out of his mind. “What is he saying? Has he got tickets for the Poseidon screening tonight? I want to go to that!”
They were all so jealous of each other. This series was all but over and they needed to be seen, they needed to be out there. When I look back on it now, and the tragedy that lay ahead for Crane, I wonder how many of us were busy keeping junk and throwing all the good things away.*
I had a lot of down time in L.A. For many actors down time is treasured time off between movies or plays or television series. But I wasn’t so much between things as looking for things to be between.
Like most young actors trying to make it in Hollywood, my pal Larry Dane had leased a wonderful apartment for himself. And, like most young actors trying to make it in Hollywood, Larry couldn’t a
fford to furnish it. So he had started building furniture, and once I saw what he was doing, I thought, I should be building furniture too. So he would come over to the house and together we would build these massive pieces, and he still talks about the wonderful weekend dinners that Charm would create for us when we had finished our work for the day. In our dreaded down time Larry and I built a massive, majestic table and two wonderful cathedral chairs, and I tried to live up to that table, by imagining myself as the head of Viking royalty. Leo Penn came to dinner and sat at the table. So did Susan Clark and Pat and Wally Cox and Nancy and John Vernon. Leah remembers “lots and lots of parties,” with Pat and Wally, John and Nancy, and many more. She remembers Leslie Nielsen standing at the buffet, pointing to a bowl of Brussels sprouts is a seriously sinister way. “Y’know what’s in those, kid?” he whispered. It would be years before she was willing to try them again.
Because I appreciated the history of Hollywood, and admired the men and women who had made that history, I didn’t have much time for those who just wanted to slip in and slide out again, without any regard for what had been achieved and accomplished before they arrived. I’m sorry to say John Vernon was one of them. But he had a couple of good contacts – Don Siegel, the director, and a couple of others – so he did all right.
Wally’s pal Marlon Brando walked out to the patio where we overlooked the valley and said, “You’ve got the best view of any of us!” And I thought, Well, then, I must be a success. So why am I still doing crap? And then Charm would say, “Oh Gordon, get over yourself!” and bring me back down to earth again.
Still, I spent more time playing with Leah than I spent in front of the camera, and when I did get in front of the camera, I frequently wished I was back at the house playing with Leah instead. In her early years she thought of me more as a playmate than a parent. Leah remembers the house mainly by what happened there. She remembers the landslides and worrying that our house was going to topple over the edge and slide down the hill, which is what Charm and I were worrying about too. She remembers the earthquake, and me and Charm jumping out of bed in the middle of the night to grab her so we could all take shelter under the heavy dining room table.
That incident also lives in her memory, she insists, because it was the first and only time she ever saw her father naked. (Well, yes, I did jump out of bed in a hurry.) She also remembers that we didn’t send her back to school for quite a while, because we had determined that if we were going to go down in an earthquake, we were all going down together.
Hollywood isn’t like any other place. You find a house you want and buy it. Life revolves around that. It revolves around the place you buy, the time you spend on the phone, the jobs you take or you don’t take. And you sit a lot, and wonder where you’re going, and wonder if you’re living their career or yours, and wonder if you’re becoming part of a yellowing kind of system where you are the tenant, not the landlord.
Your neighbours aren’t like everyone else’s neighbours. Leah liked to visit a neighbour a few doors away from us, a sweet old lady who liked Leah to read to her. The sweet old lady was Joan Blondell, the same Joan Blondell who had starred with James Cagney in The Public Enemy in 1931 and kicked up her heels with Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler in Gold Diggers of 1933.
And yes, we had a swimming pool. But everybody had a swimming pool. What I really wanted was a shot at something good. I gotta make it happen here, so I can prove myself on another level, an American level. But the work was simply not there. Those were awful times, when you weren’t sure if anyone believed in you and you weren’t sure you believed in yourself. And then every once in a while, a ray of sunshine, a brighter day.
I had a good time making Chandler, not just because it was a feature film. Chandler was an odd picture, something a little different. Chandler was a detective played by Warren Oates. I played a mafia mobster and Leslie Caron played my wife. Michael Laughlin, her husband at the time, produced it. And what a cast. Gloria Grahame, Scatman Crothers, great character actors. I loved being around them. Loved doing something different, too. But then James Aubrey, the executive John Houseman had dubbed “The Smiling Cobra,” took over MGM, and he personally re-cut the picture. Ruined it, in my opinion. It was no longer something different. In fact, it wasn’t much of anything by the time he got through with it. Two of the actors, Royal Dano and James Sikking, weren’t even in it anymore. So much for creative integrity.
* From “I Spent a Day on Easy Ridge,” by Gordon Pinsent.
* Gossip columnist Graham was already a Hollywood legend, but not for her columns. In Beloved Infidel, the 1959 screen version of her book about her affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Deborah Kerr played Sheilah and Gregory Peck played Fitzgerald.
* Bob Crane was found beaten to death in 1978 in Scottsdale, Arizona. His murder remains an unsolved homicide.
will power
I spent a day on Easy Ridge
Not nearly long enough for me
And with myself, I waited
For the light so I could see
I need no rocks to rest upon
I need not be home on time
No need to sing my distant song
In any other time but mine
Confusing how my childhood
Comes around again and round again
And no amount of strangers now
Can take what I had then*
DESPITE THE DOWN TIME THAT KEPT GETTING ME down, we pressed on. Looking back now, I remember being furious most of the time. Furious about the stuff I was not being offered and furious about the stuff I was being offered. Stuff I normally wouldn’t touch. And Charm watched it happen, watched me deal with it, sometimes badly. Washing down lunch with a couple of Scotches. Yes, it was only two o’clock in Los Angeles, but it was cocktail hour in Toronto.
Thank God for Wally.
“Do you hike, Gordon?”
“Hike?” I asked.
“No, hike is what I said. You have to say something else.”
Wally Cox was witty and brilliant and kind and funny. The first three qualities alone were enough to make him virtually shunned in Hollywood.
“We’re going to go hiking,” said Wally. “Unless you have something better to do.”
I didn’t.
Wally had become a household name in America in the fifties thanks to an NBC sitcom called Mr. Peepers. He had done guest spots on dozens of other sitcoms, usually playing the milquetoast character he had perfected. Entranced by his quick wit, producers sought him out as a panelist on such shows as What’s My Line? and, especially, Hollywood Squares.
“I’ll pick you out a nice snake stick,” said Wally. But after he saw the look on my face – had he not in fact just said the words snake stick? I was fairly sure I’d heard him correctly – he explained that on the ridges where we were going to go hiking, snakes would come out of the bushes to bask in the sun in our path.
Nor would we be hiking alone. He had also invited a friend, possibly his best friend, to join us. Years ago they had been roommates in New York, trying to eke out a living while they were studying acting with Stella Adler, and their friendship had never waned.
“What’s his name?” I inquired, so I wouldn’t forget it after we were introduced.
“Marlon,” said Wally.
You could have baked a pie in my mouth.
Surely I would not be climbing local ridges with Terry Malone from On the Waterfront. It would be like being in a film without having to audition.
Marlon, said Wally, was getting ready to do a movie over at Paramount for Francis Ford Coppola,* and thought a hike or two with Wally might help him get in shape.
“Listen,” he added, “he’s going to try to make us think he’s been running all the way from his place on Mulholland. But he’s just parked down the slope.”
Unlike Marlon, off camera Wally was strong and athletic and, as I soon learned, Wally’s idea of a “ ‘hike” was my idea (and Marlon’s) of a “climb.”
Wal
ly’s so-called hikes soon became the highlight of my weeks. We would travel off Mulholland into Bel Air, and down into this special area that defied you to see any other part of the city. And in this “escape” you’d come upon a series of ridges. Wally had named them A, B, C, D, and E. A was for astronauts; B was for bulldozers; C was for Captain America; and D was for Democrats. He had named E as Easy, as this one could be scaled in minutes, making it possible to return to the house for a drink.
The practice was to peel off our shirts, make belts out of them, and, armed with our snake sticks, simply scale the easiest of the five ridges. Wally went first, “Gordo” next, with “Marl” following behind. Oh yes, I was Gordo now. Wally loved to play with words, on any and every occasion.
He said his name was Gordo
and he had a Gordo face
But what was Gordo doin’
in this godforsaken place?
On one excursion I had diligently sharpened my snake stick to a fine, sharp point, while “Marl” had invested his time and energy decorating his forehead with a leather band, worn warrior-style. It made me wish I had one too, so I could feel that we had both come out of Western Costume together.
Out on the trail Marl’s grunting made me think he was impatient with my progress up ahead of him, but thankfully it turned out to be plain old everyday grunting, brought on by his own estrangement with the art of climbing.
Wally didn’t have to turn around that often to know that his friend Marl had not got off to a good start, and could read this from Brando’s heaving (compared to my own wheezing).
After five minutes of Edmund Hillarying, I noticed that Marlon had stopped altogether.
In a pose that suggested he had plenty more in him, he had bent over, ostensibly quite taken with a wildflower.
“Hey, Wally!” he shouted.
“Whaddyawant, you fat bastard!”
“Wassa name o’ this flower?” asked Brando.
Next Page 10