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

by MacLeod, Gavin

  I fell asleep for about two hours.

  That was it. That was my whole experience in the drug world. (By the way, Shep Sanders became a drug counselor later in life and helped people get off drugs and rehabilitate. I still see him around sometimes, and he’s such a great guy.)

  When it came right down to it, I had no interest in doing drugs. I was only curious because if it wasn’t for drugs and the junkies I played in A Hatful of Rain and The Connection, who knows when I would have gotten another play? Who knows if I would’ve had a career? I might never have made a dollar if it wasn’t for the existence of drugs in the world. It’s so strange how it all fits together.

  Speaking of how it all fits together, it’s a small world in Hollywood, and the twists and turns are something else. It was during this same period that Steve McQueen turned down a role in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and guess who filled his shoes? Robert Redford. That movie set Redford’s career on fire. Somebody should do a study someday of who wound up with certain parts versus who the producers and directors originally wanted, and how many careers were propelled because of those twists of fate. I’m fascinated by this stuff!

  Redford became the biggest star around. If not for a billing thing—the Sundance Kid coming under Butch Cassidy as the “star” of that film—McQueen might have done that picture, and Redford might still be making papier-mâché ranches. Or maybe he would have given it all up to live as a rancher in Utah somewhere. I don’t know. He’s a terrific guy, and I think he would have found success no matter what he chose to do.

  For me, the further I got into my career, the more I wanted to choose theater. Obviously, theater doesn’t pay nearly as well as film or TV. So I did both. And with the popular upswing in great musicals in the 1960s, I decided it was time to put more of my talents to good use. I did a series of plays on the West Coast—including a few for a fabulous casting supervisor by the name of Ethel Winant (who would soon play a very important role in my career)—and along the way I started training to do musical theater. I could picture myself as the star of one of those big musicals, like the ones I used to love seeing with Uncle Al on Broadway. It was a dream of mine, so I decided to put in the work I needed in order to make that dream come true, brushing up on my singing and dancing. Dancing also happens to be a great way to get back into shape, and that helped me drop some of the “Moby Dick” weight I had put on in the middle of that decade.

  As for the acting? I was getting plenty of practice in the TV world.

  I never stopped working in those days. I did a couple of episodes of Perry Mason. I did one-off appearances in Ben Casey, Run for Your Life, Combat, The Road West, Iron Horse, Garrison’s Gorillas, Death Valley Days, A Man Called Gannon, Ironside, The Flying Nun, and more. I still made a habit of coming back to the same shows as different characters, too, either wearing the hairpiece or not, including turns playing four separate characters on Hogan’s Heroes, and three turns on It Takes a Thief. It’s amazing how much work I got with a little help from that hair in the box.

  I got to work with Barbara Stanwyck three times on The Big Valley, too, and I had so much fun with that gifted, fabulous human being. We laughed our tushes off! The first Big Valley episode was called “Brother Love,” with Robert Goulet and Strother Martin, and I did it with the hairpiece on. For the other two I came back as a heavy, with no hair. I remember in the last one, she and I were in a boat together. I was about 255 pounds then and playing a guy who was trying to throw her in jail or something. A lot of my friends laughed when they saw me being so mean to Barbara Stanwyck. She’s so tiny!

  But it was the second Big Valley I did, in 1968, that I’ll never forget. First of all, I played a bad guy alongside Lew Ayres. Lew Ayres was one of my favorite actors of all time, and we would eventually get him to play my father on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. But here we were playing two heavies in the Old West, which meant working with horses. (Remember the story with the pig from Operation Petticoat? Right. I’m just not good with animals.) Well, because of my short legs, it’s hard for me to get up on a horse. They had to lower the stirrups so I could get on, and then they called “cut” and somebody had to come in and shorten the stirrups so my feet could reach them to ride. Only after my feet were back in the stirrups could we start shooting again.

  One day we were working in the rocky desert known as Vasquez Rocks, way up high, and they had just gotten me on the horse when somebody on the set yelled, “Okay!”—and man, that horse took off. I didn’t have my feet in the stirrups! What do you hold on to? I was bouncing back and forth and back and forth, and I couldn’t hold on. I fell off and landed, hard. My body went bouncing and skidding over that rocky terrain. I looked like the Phantom of the Opera when I finally got home from the hospital. (Interestingly enough, my stuntman was sitting on the sidelines watching this whole thing unfold.)

  They took me off the set on an aluminum ladder, because they didn’t have a stretcher. Missy Stanwyck (as we all called her) was coming into work just as it happened, and she looked at me lying on that ladder all bloody and said, “Look at you. I can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I?” She was such a dear. She sent something to my house. They took me to the hospital. They took me home and the kids took one look at me and started crying. The whole right side of my face was bloodied and open.

  In the meantime, I was missing my job. I got a call from the production office: “We need to finish the show!” I told them I couldn’t walk. They said, “We’ll carry you.” They couldn’t finish the show without me. They were too far into it to cast another actor. “We’ll turn your hat so you can hide your face. We’ll make it so you can lean on a railing,” they pleaded. So I did it. I didn’t want to let them down. Looking at the episode on TV, nobody would know I was so badly injured. Except for me and Missy Stanwyck, of course.

  Things always seem to happen all at once in life, don’t they? While I was recuperating from that accident, I got a call from my agent: “Norman Lear’s doing a new show. They want to see you in New York.”

  “I’m on a cane!” I reminded him.

  It didn’t matter. This was a big, big deal, he said, and they’d overlook my injuries. Norman Lear had seen me in The Connection, and he had wanted me for an earlier series back in 1960 that didn’t work out. So we had a connection.

  I told him I needed to find out a little more about it before I would agree to travel all the way to New York in my condition.

  Fortunately I knew Norman Lear’s secretary, Marian Rees, from that early series encounter, so I went to see her to talk about it. She said, “Gavin, this show is called Till Death Do Us Part. It was an English series, and it was a big hit over there. Norman wants Carroll O’Connor for the lead, but I think you are perfect for this—because this character has to be likable before he becomes this bigot.” Playing a heavy who’s likable was sort of my specialty, after all. “So we want to send you to New York to see Norman and all the producers there.”

  She offered to put me up in the Algonquin, and I had never stayed in that beautiful hotel. “Can I stay an extra day to go see my mother and brother?” I asked. I hadn’t been back to New York in a few years.

  “Sure,” she said.

  So I said I’d do it. They made the arrangements, and I went to New York with a cane. I went to the Algonquin and studied the script. Immediately I thought, This is not the script for me. The character is too much of a bigot. I can’t say these things. If I say these lines, they’re going to think it’s me, Gavin MacLeod, who’s saying them!

  Needless to say, I wasn’t too excited about doing the reading—but I was glad to be back in New York. On my first day in town I stopped by Jim Downey’s restaurant. It was the same place, but everybody had changed. The bartender was new. The staff was all different. Nobody knew me anymore. So I turned around and left.

  Norman Lear’s office was right up the street. I got there early and went to the men’s room. Who should walk in right after me, but Norman Lear! He said, “Gav
in, I’m glad you could make it!”

  It was an odd place to share our first hello in nine years.

  “You know,” I said, “I always liked you. You don’t have any hair, I don’t have any hair—but I never thought we would be in a men’s room together. This is kind of interesting.”

  To this day, people still mistake me for Norman Lear because of our bald heads. In fact, I once signed an autograph in his name, because I didn’t want to disappoint a woman who was so excited to meet him—even though it was me!

  I eventually went into the audition room and did some reading for him. I read for a couple of other people too. They said, “Can you come back later?” I said, “I’ve got a train I’ve gotta make to go up to my brother’s house upstate.” But they really wanted me back, so I squeezed it in and read again, and then again. I was getting laughs like I couldn’t believe, even though my heart wasn’t in it. I really wasn’t right for this character. Just keep at it, Gavin. It’s an experience. It gave you a chance to come home. That’s all I kept thinking.

  For some reason, even though I wasn’t giving it my all, they really liked me. I finally had to leave or I was going to miss my train. So Norman said, “Where are you going to be?”

  “I’m going to be at my brother’s house in Lake Mahopac. This is the phone number,” I said. He promised to call me the next day.

  I made the train, just in the nick of time. I got to my brother’s house and my mom was there, and my grandmother was there. We had a wonderful visit. I told them all about what I was doing in Manhattan, but later that night I told my brother, “Secretly, I hope I don’t get this part. The things this character says!” It had only been three or four years since the Watts Riots. I couldn’t imagine anyone putting a bigoted character on television. “And they’re going to have a live audience? Whoever gets it will have to wear a disguise to get out of the theater or somebody will shoot him!”

  Ronnie and I talked about something a little more serious that night too: our dad. As adults, we hadn’t really talked much about what it meant to lose him when we were so young. As I’ve mentioned, Ronnie is two years younger than I am. He had even less time together with our dad than I did. His death was devastating to both of us.

  After our dad’s friend got his cancer diagnosis and killed himself, Dad would talk about how he himself wasn’t going to live to see forty. And then he didn’t. He died at age thirty-nine.

  “Do you ever wonder if you’re gonna live past thirty-nine?” Ronnie asked me.

  I couldn’t believe those words came out of his mouth.

  “Yes!” I said. “I worry about it all the time.”

  Here I was, just a year or so shy of that landmark birthday. What if I am running out of time? Looking back, I wonder if that’s why I was always working, trying to squeeze so much in. Whatever it was, it was a relief to talk about it. Just to know that my brother had been thinking some of the same thoughts lifted a weight off my shoulders. I’m so grateful to him for that.

  All in all, we had a really nice time that night. It was so good to see my family. And then the next day I got the call. My whole family was right there, sitting around the room, watching to see my reaction, but the phone call wasn’t from Norman Lear; it was from one of the other producers. “Gavin,” he said, “we’ve thought long and hard about this and we really liked you, but we’re gonna go with Carroll.”

  “Oh!” I said. “Thank you! This is the way it was supposed to be. I wish you the best with the series and I’m so glad I got to come and see my family.”

  I was so relieved. I wouldn’t have been happy doing that show. Of course, that show would get renamed and become All in the Family—one of the most successful, controversial, and influential series in the history of television. It would take a couple of different pilots and a couple more years before it would get made, and it wouldn’t go on air until January 1971. A lot would happen to me both personally and professionally by then. But Carroll was brilliant in it. Jean Stapleton was brilliant in it. The whole cast was phenomenal. It turned out exactly right. Just the way it was supposed to. It was one of the most incredible shows ever. I wasn’t right for that show, and that was okay. I knew that someday, at some point, the right thing would come along for me if it was going to happen.

  When it came to my work, I really was a glass-half-full kind of guy. I always tried to keep that positive attitude. I was always excited to see what would come next.

  Little did I know, my glass was about to get very, very full.

  10

  YOU’RE GONNA MAKE IT AFTER ALL

  TALK ABOUT A SMALL WORLD. I WOUND UP WORKING on Kelly’s Heroes, the very last film I would shoot in the 1960s, with none other than Carroll O’Connor. This was after I went in for that audition, and a year and a half before All in the Family would make it on air. The two of us, along with a lot of other really great actors, worked together in an LA theater group called Theater West as well. Hollywood was a very small world back then.

  We all had fun on that Kelly’s Heroes shoot, and Carroll and I became good friends—and drinking buddies. We would stay up all night drinking and writing together. In fact, we came up with a project that we were sure could be the next great American musical: Guilt! We worked on a script, complete with songs with lyrics and everything!

  It was months and months we shot—and months and months, once again, that I was away from my family, drinking, and then fighting with Rootie almost the moment I got home. While Guilt the musical never went anywhere, the guilt and shame I felt over the state of my marriage was eating me up. So I kept my mind on my work just about all the time.

  All of us actors left Yugoslavia thinking we had done something really spectacular on that film. You never really know until the editing is done and they put the music in and everything, but I came home from Kelly’s Heroes ready to tackle the world!

  I belonged to another theater group at the time as well, called Words and Music. They were doing a production of Carousel, and the first thing I did when I got back to Hollywood was to play the part of Jigger in that fabulous musical. Jigger’s kind of the heavy in it, which I loved, but the best part of that experience was that all four of my kids were in the cast. They played the Snow Children. They were all so young, and we enjoyed working together on that show, rehearsing in a space over a bowling alley. I loved being around my children. I would never stop loving being around them. Ever. No matter what happened between Rootie and me.

  We were in the middle of rehearsing that stage musical when my agent called: “Mary Tyler Moore is doing a pilot called The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and it’s CBS, and they want to see you.”

  I said, “Great! Where do I go?”

  They sent me two scripts, and written on the front was: “Gavin—The part of Lou Grant.” I read the pilot before going to sleep that night and thought, This is funny stuff. The writing was superb. As I read it, I told my wife, “This is written so well. But I worked with Mary on Dick Van Dyke twice, and I wouldn’t believe myself as her boss. I’m more of a contemporary. I just don’t see myself as being her boss. But there’s a part of Murray, this guy, the writer Murray—maybe I could do something with him. That would be fun.”

  My agent set up the appointment and I was really excited. I thought this series had the potential to be something really special. Sometimes you just know these things. After all the not-so-good scripts you read, and especially given the breadth of experience I’d had in the thirteen years since I first moved out to California, you really know it when you read something great. So I went over to CBS Television City, praying, “God, let me say the right things!”

  The first person I saw when I walked into the room was Ethel Winant, the casting executive I had worked for in a number of plays on the West Coast. She was now the first female vice president of CBS and was directly responsible for getting The Mary Tyler Moore Show on air. Seeing her was a good start, and seeing the other writer-producer talents in that room was astounding: James L. B
rooks and Allan Burns. They asked what I had been up to, and I told them about Kelly’s Heroes, and who was in it, and how the shoot went. Small talk, basically. And then I read for the part of Lou Grant.

  I tell you, I got every laugh I could get—every laugh that was in that script. But I still didn’t think it was right for me. The people in the room all seemed very pleased and said, “Thank you very much. You were so good!” But as I had my hand on the door handle to leave I decided to speak my mind. I stopped and turned back to them.

  “Listen, you guys. The script is great. Lou Grant is a fantastic character. But the truth is, I wouldn’t believe myself as him. I feel I’m more of a contemporary of Mary’s. Maybe that’s my problem; I always think I’m younger than I am! I don’t know. But I really like the character Murray.”

  “You like Murray?” they said. They seemed surprised.

  “Yeah! I like him.”

  “You want to read?”

  “I sure do!” So I read a couple of lines, and the producers responded. Jim Brooks started laughing that big guffaw of his—“Oh, oh, oh!”—and Allan Burns kept saying, “Mmm, mmm . . .”

  I thought, Wow. Something just happened here. So that’s when I stopped. I stopped when they were all mid-laughter, enjoying my performance, and said, “That’s all I want to do. Good luck!” And I walked out the door.

  I went out into the lobby, and there was Ed Asner pacing back and forth, getting ready to go in and read for the part of Lou Grant—the very same part they had originally called me in for. We were back-to-back on our auditions. Can you believe that?