Next

by Gordon Pinsent

  God bless the L.A. Times.

  Refreshed and renewed, I return to Hollywood. Everything will be different now. I may even get offered a serious film – maybe even a film that dares to take a fresh look at the lives of our beleaguered African-American neighbours. Something movie audiences have never seen before. A story with a clear, unmistakable moral.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  * Film history aficionados say the house-burning sequence still exists, in a making-of documentary shot at the same time as they were shooting the film, called Action, Cut and Print.

  home to the hill

  NO SOONER HAD WE ARRIVED BACK AT OUR HOUSE IN the Hollywood Hills – had we even unpacked our bags? – when the phone rang. My agent-du-jour was calling with an offer for a fairly substantial role in a new movie. And not just any movie. No, this would be a film that dared to take a fresh look at the lives of our beleaguered African-American neighbours. Something movie audiences had never seen before. A story with a clear, unmistakable moral.

  The story, what there was of it, was about an African prince who gets bitten by a nobleman from Transylvania – yes, that nobleman – and then gets locked in a coffin for two hundred years until two L.A. antique dealers buy the coffin and open it, thereby unleashing Blacula – yes, Blacula – on the City of Angels.

  Not quite the serious drama I had in mind. I suppose you could call it a period piece, in as much as they never should have made it, period. But somebody had to play the police lieutenant, and after The Rowdyman my bank account definitely needed a transfusion.

  I said Yes.

  As sorry as I was feeling for myself I felt even worse for William Marshall, Vonetta McGee, and Denise Nicholas (Charm’s cast-mate in Room 222), because they were the leads, and they had to carry the movie. A year later the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films in the U.S. gave Blacula their Golden Scroll Award for Best Horror Film of the Year, but none of us rushed to include it on our resumés.

  What a comedown – not to mention a letdown – after shooting Rowdyman on a mere fraction of the budget they were spending on this piece of crap. Never mind, I told myself, no one you know is ever going to see this. And to this day, by and large, that’s still true.

  There were more letdowns waiting in the wings – a series of disappointments that could only serve to feed my growing discontent. I started writing again – this time a play about a Newfoundland couple who are forced to move off the land they love when the mine shuts down. The more I wrote, the less like a play it seemed. No, I thought, this is not a play, and it’s certainly not a movie. It must be a novel. So I tore it up and started all over again.

  Charm could see how restless I was, and she understood it, not only because she knew me better than I knew myself but also because she was getting restless herself. Her friend Kate now had her first hit movie, The Andromeda Strain, for Sound of Music director Robert Wise, and was in London shooting the screen version of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance with Katharine Hepburn and Paul Scofield. Her friend Barbara had just wrapped a six-part mini-series, Anne of Green Gables, and the writers were already dreaming up new scenes for her in a sequel to be set in a picturesque Atlantic town called Avonlea. When Charm was asked to join Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James on an episode of McMillan & Wife, she was relieved and delighted to do so.

  Rock Hudson was a widescreen action hero who had learned his craft on the job, and surprised everyone, including himself, by becoming the best romantic comedy actor since Cary Grant. When Hollywood started to lose interest in him, Hudson had turned to television, where he and the gifted Ms. Saint James could give each episode the playful light touch it needed, and where he was instantly a top draw.

  Similarly, George Peppard had turned to television after a promising film career stalled and fizzled. Vincente Minnelli had introduced Peppard to moviegoers in a 1960 potboiler called Home from the Hill, and Peppard had followed up with a string of hits (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, How the West Was Won, The Victors, The Carpetbaggers). For whatever reason, he consequently chose a series of action roles that made few demands on him creatively, and after a string of B-movies and a sudden dearth of offers, he discovered that television audiences were less picky about plot and character development. I first met him when I did a guest shot on his sporadic dramatic series, Banacek, in which he played a Polish-American detective. Between takes George sat on a tall director’s perch, made of leather, not canvas, literally looking down on us, the rest of his cast, as we sat in the standard folding chairs. Some actors found this somewhat off-putting; I found it funny, and tried not to crack up every time we had to sit down at the same time. I don’t think his two Banacek sidekicks, Ralph Manza and Murray Matheson, found it quite as amusing as I did, but George seemed to think it was funny too. George was still drinking then, still smoking two packs a day, and yet, with the help of five devoted wives – he had just been divorced by second wife Elizabeth Ashley – he would in time conquer his alcoholism and keep himself and his career going for another two decades.*

  Keeping a career going, for any actor, is no small accomplishment. On a film called Incident on a Dark Street, Bill Shatner was billed fifth, Gilbert Roland was billed seventh, John Kerr was billed eleventh, and I was way down at the bottom of the list – twenty-ninth, or something like that. I played the mayor, a glorified bit part, and as usual I found my cast-mates far more interesting than the script. I was fascinated to see Gilbert Roland in the flesh. He had started making movies in the twenties – he was about sixty-five now, still full of energy, with no intention of retiring. His film credits were dazzling, from playing The Cisco Kid to major roles in major movies like The Bad and the Beautiful. He’d worked with all the greats, from John Huston to John Ford, and had seduced more than a few of his leading ladies. Even now, he was still seducing the camera, and would continue to do so for another decade or more.

  The real shock for me was seeing John Kerr so far down on the totem pole. Eleventh billing? How could that be? Twenty years earlier he had co-starred with Deborah Kerr (no relation) on Broadway in Maxwell Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy. Directed by Elia Kazan, he had won the Tony Award for Best Actor, and then reprised his role onscreen for director Vincente Minnelli. Two years later he was on movie screens all over the world as Lieutenant Joe Cable in the screen version of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific. But despite those blazing big-screen moments he supported himself mainly by acting on television, at first at such auspicious addresses as the Hallmark Hall of Fame and Playhouse 90, and then by doing guest shots on the high-ratings TV series of the day – Gunsmoke, The Virginian, Wagon Train. He did them all, from Alfred Hitchcock Presents to Peyton Place. Even while we were shooting this TV movie for director Buzz Kulik,* Kerr had already started to play recurring characters in two of the top drama series of the day, Police Story and The Streets of San Francisco. He was interested in directing, too, and was apprenticing with Leo Penn. From what I could see John Kerr loved acting, especially in courtroom dramas, and he loved being on camera. Perhaps he too was addicted to saying Yes, and like me, determined to make the most of whatever opportunity came his way. In his so-called spare time he had graduated from UCLA Law School and was now a bona fide Beverly Hills lawyer, and although he couldn’t always commit to new film projects, he seemed to enjoy living in both worlds.

  I could relate to that, in some manner, because I felt that I was also living in two worlds, with one foot dragging me through Hollywood and one foot somewhat insecurely planted in Toronto. But I happily put both feet on an Air Canada plane when the Canadian Film Awards were announced. The Rowdyman lost the Best Picture statuette to a dark little film by Bill Fruet called Wedding in White, which featured Donald Pleasence and a frighteningly shy performance by a nineteen-year-old slip of an American actress named Carol Kane. Best Actress went to Micheline Lanctôt for her stunning work in Gilles Carle’s wonderful La vrai nature de Bernadette. And Best Actor went to Porky for The Rowdyman. Needless t
o say I was delighted, and then delighted all over again when I was asked to host the second-ever ACTRA Awards.

  Over the years I had discovered that I enjoyed hosting on camera. The first time I had ever hosted anything was before I left Winnipeg – a CBC musical show called Music for a Quarter. Why? Because it was fifteen minutes long. (I spoke faster then!) A lot of networks were running live-to-air fifteen-minute music shows back then. Eddie Fisher did one twice a week sponsored by Coca-Cola, Coke Time with Eddie Fisher. Dinah Shore did one too, before she took over Sunday night on NBC. Bands on fifteen-minute music shows were comprised of some of the best musicians on the planet; Lenny Breau was one of ours, and you couldn’t get a better musician than Lenny.

  In all, I hosted the ACTRA Awards about three times, I think, once with elegant trailblazer and renowned broadcaster Barbara Frum. I hosted the Genie Awards too, once in white tie and white tux, leaning on a white piano, singing something I can’t quite recall, and once with Dawn Greenhalgh and Ted Follows’s daughter Megan, still known all over the world as the quintessential Anne of Green Gables. On that one I finger-synched rocking out on an electric guitar. We assumed everybody would know it was a gag, until one Calgary reviewer commented, “You think he can act? Just wait ’til you hear him on electric guitar!” So maybe I was just a little too convincing.

  Back in 1973 the offer to host the ACTRAs was a welcome respite from the B-movie life I felt I was living in Hollywood. The awards had started quite modestly one year earlier, and sculptor Bill McElcheran had created the corpulently voluptuous statuette who had been nicknamed Nellie, possibly after Nellie McClung. (Most of us always thought it looked more like Barbara Ham. Including Barbara Ham.) I sang a song I had written, “Children of the Thirties,” and had a bit of fun with Kate Reid and Pierre Berton. Pierre was nominated that night, and Kate, notorious for her offstage binges, was conspicuously absent, having begged off with the flu.

  “One of our leading ladies couldn’t be here tonight,” I said, “because she has the flu. As a matter of fact I understand she had several gallons of flu last week.” Which drew nervous titters and appreciative guffaws. And then, looking around the room: “My God! Just look at this crowd! There’s more wall-to-wall talent in this room … and more tinsel … and more glamour … and more ego … than when Pierre Berton dines alone!”

  A 1972 ACTRA winner himself, Pierre couldn’t wait to corner me as I came offstage.

  “Who did you get that line from?” he demanded.

  “Made it up on the spot,” I lied.

  “You got that from somewhere!” he insisted. “I know where you got it from, and one of these days I’ll remember it!”

  All in all I had a very good time, and so did my peers, which made it somewhat easier, and somewhat harder, to return to Hollywood. But return I did, to Charm and Leah and the house off Mulholland Drive, and a stint on another weekly cop show, Cannon, which turned out to be memorable for all the wrong reasons.

  William Conrad had played Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke on radio, and he played more than one hundred “heavies” on television before he actually got the lead in his own television series. And there he was now, bored to tears – he’d already done maybe thirty episodes of Cannon by the time I did one – and I could hear him approaching, grumbling. I was playing the villain again, and I was married to Susan Oliver, and the two of us were in this trailer travelling across the United States. And I could hear him coming – this was day one – barking at the first A.D.: “Okay, what’s this episode called? Which one is this?” There was no sense of, Hey, this is important, we’ve got to get this right. From what I was observing he had already tired of the show, and didn’t want to be doing it. But of course he didn’t want anybody else doing it.

  “Well, obviously I haven’t read it,” he told the first A.D., “so you’d better get out the cards.” And he played all our scenes together looking over my shoulder to the cue cards the A.D. was holding up behind me.

  At one point he said, “Do you know George McCowan?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “He’s a queer one, isn’t he … a strange one!”

  “I like George McCowan,” I said. “He’s one of my favourite people.”

  “Is he!” he said. “He could be brilliant, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said.

  That was the kind of conversation you would have with Conrad. He seemed to like making you squirm. We had this fight scene, between two cars, and he said, “I don’t want a stuntman, do you?” I said, “Nah!” And he pinned me up against this Cadillac, the one with the wings, and I had to go to the nurses’ station before the end of the day.

  He was one of those people, like certain other people in our business, who learned just enough about it all to get what they wanted – and they knew what they wanted. Just wanted a paycheque and a few other perks. I wanted a paycheque too, but not at that cost. If you’re in a series, and you’re bored to tears, you still aren’t doing anything else, because there isn’t time to do anything else – no time to read a book, to think about a scene, to think about how you might play it differently, to think about the different shades you could bring to it. You just get up the next day and do it all over again.

  You can’t have it all. If you’re in a hit series – and who doesn’t want to be in a hit series? – you’re picked up every morning at five and brought back home every night at seven, and if you’re in a hit you could be doing this for six or seven years, and you have no time to learn about the world. And you get so bored with it. And that apathy is absolutely killing after a while. Even when I was doing Quentin Durgens and, later, A Gift to Last, there should have been enough there to keep me interested. And there was, and I was. But I couldn’t help thinking that there could be other wonderful things waiting for me, and that I was losing time. And I was starting to come into more significant birthdays, because I wasn’t a kid anymore. A few years ago I told Leah, “I’m so glad you didn’t end up in a series like Charlie’s Angels. Because you would have had no time to learn what you know now.”

  Remember Robert Young? I had grown up watching him on the big screen and the small screen, when we still believed the lie that Father Knows Best. What I didn’t know, what none of us knew, was that his acute anxiety fuelled his days and nights, and he was still engaged in his thirty-year battle with the bottle when I played a “guest doctor” on his hit series Marcus Welby, M.D. As one of Hollywood’s leading men he had romanced Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, and Loretta Young on the silver screen, but was painfully shy in real life. His shyness had propelled him from social drinker to alcoholic in his MGM years, and despite all his later success with Father Knows Best, first on radio and then on television, his raging insecurity required that crutch to get him through the day.

  It wasn’t for lack of trying. He had initiated a ritual at the start of every day on the set of Marcus Welby where cast and crew would join hands for a minute of silent prayer or meditation, and I later learned that he often held AA meetings in his home. He would be in his seventies before he managed to stop drinking once and for all, and despite being beset by Alzheimer’s and heart problems, he would live to ninety-one.

  A lot of actors I have appreciated have gone to the funerals of their livers long before their time; not having, to a large part, fairly lived up to the promising quality of their organs. Perhaps I should have been disturbed to discover that so many of the silver screen heroes of my youth had feet of clay, but instead I felt a surprising sense of relief. I wasn’t the only one with anxieties. I wasn’t the only one drinking Scotch in the middle of the day. And then I realized that staying any longer would be the fastest way to the graveyard for me as a creative individual. A fair-to-good actor in Hollywood, trying to get established, will be only too happy to get himself a long-running series. It’s better than driving a truck or digging a ditch. But I felt I was being taken over – quite easily, in fact. And I was growing more restless and more impatient.


  My pal Perry Rosemond had come to Hollywood before us and would stay longer. We spent a fair bit of time in Los Angeles together. “Gordon,” Perry would say, “we are strangers in a strange land. In Canada you can act, write, direct, produce. In America, if you do fenders, you don’t do hubcaps.”

  I made up my mind that I was just not “right” for Hollywood, not in the usual sense. Yes, with the vast numbers of shows being done, I would fit somewhere, but I was not a “natural,” I was not Rock Hudson, I was a character actor with a leading man’s face, with the good stuff underneath the makeup.

  I’ve always felt that. You can go through four lifetimes in Los Angeles and never get the best material, never get the opportunities you seek. So if things go funny you’ve got to remember who you are, so that when you leave the house you take you with you. You don’t leave you behind. You don’t go out in the world to impersonate. We’ve got impersonators. We don’t need any more.

  What you do need to do is be yourself. Because that may be the richest thing you have, and that may be the thing that they are looking for as well. Or not. But in the meantime, the clock is ticking. Because you use up a lot of time there. I wasn’t in line for the good material, unless I happened to luck out. The bigger stars were coming from the movies and going into television. So the things that came around were not really my idea of where I wanted to go. And that could have gone on forever. I remember the health club in Encino, all these aging actors with old faces and young bodies, all waiting for the phone to ring. I took a lesson from that, too.