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

by MacLeod, Gavin

  On the way into work some days I’d pick up a six-pack of beer. It wasn’t all for me. I was sharing it with the guys! We’d drink between takes, or during breaks. Though I tried it, I never got into hard liquor, and I truly didn’t drink a whole lot, in terms of volume. I was just an Irish slop, I suppose—a little bit was all it took to get me going.

  Looking back today, it seems clear to me: I was missing something in my life. There was a huge hole that needed to be filled, and I was filling it with all the wrong things.

  I was on that show for two years. Two years. That may not seem like a long time. A lot of people stay at jobs they hate for decades. But given how quickly my career had been trucking along ever since Rootie and I moved to California, two years felt like a lifetime. I wasn’t able to do the kind of work I loved. I wasn’t able to do anything outside of this show, where I sat around and occasionally got propped up in front of the cameras.

  One night I went back to Tom Skerritt’s house after work, and I really had a lot to drink. I was pretty inebriated. Too inebriated to get behind the wheel, for sure. But I did. I climbed into my car feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders. Defeated. Terrible. I kept thinking, This is it. My career is gone. I’d destroyed it by signing my life over to this “glorified extra” role on a TV show.

  I drove around for who knows how long, feeling awful about myself, awful about how I was destroying my marriage, about everything. I got all the way to the top of Mulholland Drive, which overlooks all of the sparkling lights of Los Angeles, and I thought, It’s just not worth it! I turned the wheel toward the side of that winding road and sped straight toward the edge of a cliff.

  With the city lights spread out before me and my eyes glazed over, I could see the trees disappear to each side of me and nothing but open sky ahead as the car got closer and closer to the edge until suddenly, Pfft! My right leg stomped on the brake and the car skidded to a stop in the dirt.

  I slumped over the wheel. My heart was pounding. I took deep breaths, trying to regain my composure. What am I doing? All I could hear was the sound of the engine, and as I looked up all I could see were the lights and the stars. There was no road left in front of me at all. My tires were just inches from the edge of that cliff.

  If my right foot hadn’t hit the brake when it did, it would have been all over.

  I can’t begin to explain why I stopped, or how that happened. It’s almost as if something else lifted my leg and stomped my foot on that brake for me. The only explanation I have after all these years is that God was looking after me. Even though I didn’t know it, he was there. God is there 24/7, and clearly he had other plans for me that didn’t include dying on that dark LA mountaintop!

  I put the car into reverse and gently eased off the brake, backing up and turning around to get my bearings. I realized where I was. Robert Blake didn’t live far from there, so I drove over to see him. I woke him up. He said, “What are you doing up here by yourself in the middle of the night?” And I just laid it all on him.

  “I’m not worth anything!” I moaned.

  Like a lot of men, especially men with young families, I was getting all of my identity through my work and not through who I really was. I didn’t know that then. I didn’t realize, as I would many years later, that my identity comes through my Lord and Savior and my relationship with God. That’s the whole answer for me. But I was decades away from that realization.

  On that particular night, the lowest point of my life, Robert Blake was the guy who set me right. “You’ve got to get to a shrink,” he said. “You can’t keep going on like this.”

  He called his guy, Dr. Joe Shore, and I started to see him once a week. You know what? It helped. And it wasn’t too long before he gave me a plan of action—a plan I knew I had to take. “You know what you have to do?” he said. “You have to get out of that show. If your identity is coming from the size of your parts and your billing and the money, you have to get out of it.”

  I knew he was right.

  The second season was over and the studio had sent me a stack of pictures of my character, “Happy” Haines, to sign—and I just couldn’t sign them. Our producer Eddie Montagne was a great guy. But I said to myself, “I have to take the bull by the horns. I can’t stay here and go down the tubes.” We did the McHale’s Navy movies. And finally they called one day wondering where those pictures were, and I said, “Can I come down and talk to Eddie?”

  I went to see him and said, “I know I’ve got a signed contract, but you can save me and my whole family. I just feel as an actor that I’m almost a nonentity on this show.” I told him about being used as a prop to hide buildings in the background. I told him what Ted Knight had said: You’re a glorified extra. Eddie knew what I was capable of as an actor. He knew the acclaim I had received for The Connection. He listened to me, and he said, “I had no idea. Of course you can get out.” And that was that. No more “Happy” Haines.

  The very next week I got a call from my director friend John Erman for a recurring role on My Favorite Martian. I put on the hairpiece and a suit, and I became a young guy all over again. It was a fresh start.

  Our daughter Julia was born in January 1964. I asked Robert Blake to be her godfather, and he accepted. I have showered her with love and affection ever since the day she was born.

  Of course, I also celebrated that day by going out drinking.

  In spite of the therapy and in spite of the newfound joy I felt once I was free of that “glorified extra” role, I still felt miserable inside. The fights with Rootie were growing worse. I loved my kids, and I was involved with them, but I also felt the overwhelming need to provide a better life for them, and I was driven like never before. I needed more work. I wanted more work. I craved it, much more than I ever craved alcohol. But I couldn’t stop drinking, nonetheless.

  I took roles in all kinds of TV shows. I jumped at roles in a series of plays in Los Angeles. Work, work, work was all I wanted to do. In 1965 my wife gave birth to our fourth child, our daughter Meghan, and I filled up once again with that fatherly love, showering her with affection. Rootie and I saw a marriage counselor. We wanted to make things better between us. But the counseling didn’t help. Something kept pulling me away from the marriage. I felt like I was the breadwinner, and I was responsible for taking care of her and the kids, yet at the same time I felt this pull to be somewhere else. I couldn’t explain it.

  One day, the great Robert Wise called. I hadn’t worked with him since I Want to Live! in 1958, but he said he was thinking of me for a part in his next film. “I have one question to ask you,” he said. “How tall are you?”

  I said, “How tall do you want me to be?”

  He said, “You can’t be taller than Steve McQueen.”

  “I know Steve!” I told him. “He and I played brothers on Broadway, and Steve is definitely taller than me.” He told me all about this new starring vehicle for Steve, which would be shooting in Taiwan. It would take us overseas for ten months, he said.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, without one thought about the effect that might have on my family, I said, “I’d love to do it!” He hired me over the phone.

  The film was The Sand Pebbles, starring Steve, Candice Bergen, Richard Attenborough, and Richard Crenna. I kissed my wife and kids good-bye. I went from LA to Hawaii, then Hawaii to Tokyo, slept overnight, then Tokyo to Taiwan—first class. I had never done that kind of a trip before. I got off in Taiwan and the smell hit me. Phew! This was gonna be a long ten months!

  The studio sent a car to pick me up and take me to the hotel, and standing in front of the hotel as I drove up was Steve McQueen. He recognized me right away and said, “Well, bro. You ever think I’d be a big movie star?” And I said, “To tell you the truth, I didn’t! But I always thought you were really interesting close up.” We talked for a couple more minutes, and I remember telling him, “You’ve really got a home now.” He smiled and said, “I’m really glad you could do this.” I said, “Me
too.”

  That was the most substantial conversation I had with McQueen for those whole ten months. He was such a movie star! In fact, he’d get nominated for an Academy Award for that role. Years later, he had cancer and went all over the world trying to find a cure. What a sad ending he had.

  I think of the ending I almost had, on that cliff on Mulholland Drive. It all could have ended right there. What would I have been? Another Hollywood story. A bald-headed character actor with a bit of acclaim whose life was cut too short.

  I never could have imagined that someday I would be the captain of my own show, anchoring a TV series! Or that I would someday represent a cruise line, a huge company, as an ambassador who would travel all over the world! I never imagined that I would be an ambassador in a much more important way either.

  All I needed to have was faith. Faith in myself. Faith in God. It seems so clear now looking back on it. But it wasn’t clear then.

  I wrote home to Rootie, telling her I was sorry. I promised to be a different man and a better father as soon as I returned. I always smiled at the thought of my children, and I knew they were in such capable hands. Rootie was, and always would be, a fantastic mother to them. I knew that. And I wanted to be a better father. Even as I kept drinking. Even as I gained weight to the point where some of the cast and crew on The Sand Pebbles started calling me “Moby Dick.”

  I spent long nights getting into deep, dark conversations, questioning what it all meant, questioning what it meant to be an actor, wondering aloud whether there really was a God. Candice Bergen would tell me to lighten up. Life’s supposed to be fun! I agreed with her. I had always been a happy guy. I enjoyed life. I liked it when life was easy and light. I just couldn’t understand why I felt the way I felt. I kept asking myself, What’s wrong with me?

  Then one day, I decided to find out. Word got around that there was a powerful Taiwanese fortune-teller in town. You had to make an appointment with this man, and he would tell you your future, they said. “If you bring your problems to him, he will help you.” So my friend Joe Di Reda, who played “Red Dog” Shanahan in the movie, and I scheduled an appointment. We both walked in, and this guy was sitting at a table. He had a box filled with different objects and cards with colors, letters, numbers, and different things. First he looked at my hands, and he asked if I had a favorite number—I always used to say “seven” because it was my grandmother’s favorite number—and then he shook this box and some cards with numbers came out, and he spoke. I don’t really remember much about what he said during that portion of the reading. But when he touched my forehead, he said, “You know, your grandfather very spiritual.”

  He was talking about my mother’s father, Jimmy—the one who had made a promise to God to stop drinking if he brought his son home safe from the war. I had never really thought about him as a “spiritual” man. But he was. And it struck me as odd that this fortune-teller would say such a thing. It didn’t answer my big question about what was wrong with me, but still, I thought it was interesting.

  We paid him, and he said, “Next!”

  Then, as I had my hand on the door, just as I was about to go, that fortune-teller shouted, “You!” I turned and looked at him, and he stared directly into my eyes. “You,” he said. “Be like Jesus.”

  I didn’t know what to make of it. I didn’t know what to do with that order. I just walked out thinking, What a strange thing for a Taiwanese fortune-teller to say.

  9

  HALF-FULL . . .

  AS SOON AS I CAME HOME FROM THE SAND Pebbles, I was hired to do a new series called The Rat Patrol—a series they were shooting in Spain. So off I went. It was only a weeklong shoot, but the disappointment in Rootie’s eyes was almost too much for me to bear.

  I was only a guest star on The Rat Patrol, yet here is the irony of movie making: I had more lines on that show in one week than I had in ten months on The Sand Pebbles. That’s just what the business is like. I had a death scene too. I love death scenes. Most of the shows that I died in, the first scene I shot was my death scene. I remember in the black-and-white days, they used Karo syrup and had it coming out of your mouth to simulate blood. Then we got color and they had to use the red stuff. (I’ve been in this business a long time, haven’t I?)

  For a guy who liked doing death scenes, I shudder to think how close I came to the real thing. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I think a lot of people hit those moments before they really know who they are. It doesn’t matter how successful you are in your work. And it certainly doesn’t matter how successful you are in other people’s eyes. I was on TV and in the movies! People would say, “You’re a big success!” And I was, I suppose. But people don’t know what you go through. We all go through struggles. We’re all on this journey, trying to find out who we really are and what really matters.

  Interestingly enough, I did some of my best character work in the latter half of the 1960s, at the very same time I was going through this struggle.

  One of the most memorable characters I ever played was on the first season of Hawaii Five-O, with Jack Lord. The guy’s name was Big Chicken and he was this fat, slimy, condescending guy who would get kids hooked on drugs and then get them to steal for him. The reviews were incredible! With my bald head and my ballooning weight, I just went for it. I made him as despicable as I possibly could. The papers said they had never seen a character like this on television before. Ever. There are still references to Big Chicken found all over the Internet to this day. It was quite a thing. In fact, the response was so overwhelming, they wrote me into another episode later on, after Big Chicken had gone to jail. Jack went in to see him to try to get some information to help with another case he was working on. I loved getting another shot to bring that awful character to life.

  Jack Lord asked me to have lunch with him in his trailer during that shoot. “You’re the most courageous actor I’ve ever seen. You take such chances!” he said. It was incredibly flattering. “Where do you get the nerve to do this?”

  “It’s the character. It’s not me,” I told him. “When I’m playing it, that’s who that guy is.”

  Ed Asner did a guest role on Hawaii Five-O when he was younger, too, playing a jewelry thief. In the new version of the show that debuted in 2010, they brought back that character (and Ed). The detectives went to see him to ask about something years later, when he was out of prison. My brother, Ronnie, says we should start a petition to get them to bring back Big Chicken! The only way I would do it now, I think, is if that slime ball were rehabilitated and helping kids instead of hurting them. But I’d sure love to get another shot at it!

  It’s odd to think about how many times I’ve played pushers or druggies or some heavy who’s involved in something related to drugs. In real life, I only tried drugs twice in my life, and both times were during my late 1960s run of great roles.

  The first was during the filming of Blake Edwards’s brilliant 1968 comedy The Party, with Peter Sellers. Several people on the set would take a little lunchtime smoke break, if you know what I mean. That sort of thing was par for the course in those days. It seemed as if everyone was smoking something!

  The Party was improvised, start to finish, with nothing but an outline for a script, which was so much fun. In fact, there’s a hilarious bit in the movie involving my hairpiece that we improvised on the spot. My character’s last name was Divot, which is another name for a hairpiece. I normally wouldn’t like people to see me wearing it and then not wearing it, but I would do anything for Blake Edwards.

  We shot on the Sam Goldwyn lot (where I would shoot some of The Love Boat a decade later), and a bunch of us had heard that if you smoke some banana leaves, you could get something going. So we tried it! And we got nothing. Afterward, a girl in the film said, “Why don’t you follow me home tonight, and you can see what it’s really like?” I have to admit, I was curious. So I went to her apartment, and I looked over and there was a couple sitting motionless, just staring at the television
set with no sound on. What’s going on here? I wondered. Anyway, she handed me a brownie and I ate it. And I waited around a little bit, and I said, “Nothing’s going on here!” She asked me if I wanted to smoke, and I did, and that didn’t really do anything for me either. So that was that. I went home.

  The Party was such a fun shoot. I remember on our closing night, Blake said, “I’m gonna bring somebody to the party tonight. You’re gonna be surprised.” He brought Julie Andrews! Julie was at absolutely the top of her game at that time, and that night was the first time people saw them together—the first time they went out in public as a couple. They would later get married and stay together through thick and thin. They were still together when Blake passed away in 2010. A beautiful Hollywood love story if there ever was one.

  Funny enough, Julie Andrews used to come into Downey’s restaurant now and then when she was in New York doing The Boyfriend, back when I was a cashier. I used to see her in those days, and I reminded her that we spoke a couple of times at the register. It was so great to meet her properly, and especially to see her and Blake together.

  If you’ve never seen The Party, go rent it. It’s such a treat of a film, and a snapshot of the excess of that era. It has survived pretty well as a cult hit all these years, still getting just as many uproarious laughs as it did back then.

  Getting back to my illicit activities. Skipping ahead to 1969, I got cast with a fantastic group of actors in a film called Kelly’s Heroes. It was another overseas shoot that would once again pull me away from my family, this time to Yugoslavia (which no longer exists), with Carroll O’Connor, Donald Sutherland, Clint Eastwood, Don Rickles, and Telly Savalas. What a cast! I didn’t hang around Telly very much, because he headed the infantry in the film. The rest of us worked together in the tanks in the movie. So we shot on different schedules. We were back at my friend Shep Sanders’s place one night, and he had some hashish in a pipe. We had worked together on The Sand Pebbles, too, so I knew him well and trusted him. I was curious. Everybody kept talking about doing drugs like it was the best thing ever, you know? Here I was, a character actor known for playing druggies, and I had no idea what it really felt like to be high. So I gave it another shot. I took a few hits (as they say) and said, “Oh, man . . . I feel so mellow!”