Crane (7 page)

We drove to the morgue. I noticed that life was still being enjoyed by the local residents, running in their yards, spraying each other with hoses, children selling lemonade at the curb, couples riding bicycles. There were butterflies, hummingbirds. The sun was shining. It all seemed impossible. Death was a long way from their front yards.

At the morgue, Vaughn and Goldstein stayed behind as I was led into
a cold, barren, uniquely unfriendly room. The sun never saw this place. My dad was lying on his back on a concrete slab. For the first time in his life, he was silent. No laughter. No nervous energy. No nothing. Just complete and absolute stillness, and it was that stillness that confirmed to me his death was real. My dad was lifeless. Life less.

I wasn’t going to read about this in a newspaper, or watch some Barbie doll anchor work up the solemnity to stare into the camera and announce “Hollywood’s loss.” I wouldn’t get the awkward phone call from a friend or relative who was unsure whether or not to tell me about it. There he was. Laid out on a slab.

I walked up to him. He was nude. I looked him over from head to toe. He was cleaned up. There was no blood on him. I stared at his face. I waited for him to open his eyes, look over at me, and start laughing, but it didn’t happen. I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. His skin felt like clay, the gray modeling clay I had played with in elementary school. It was cool to the touch. I panned his body, taking note of his thick head of hair, flat ears, chewed fingernails, hairless chest, uncircumcised penis, thin legs, long toes. He looked normal to me. How could he be dead? I felt numb. I didn’t cry. I didn’t experience an emotional upheaval. I was too occupied with mentally recording everything I saw—my dad, the slab, the room’s décor. All lacked sensation. The scene was as removed from me as a dreary police procedural on television. I looked over my dad’s body again, head to toe, toe to head. This was an animated person in life who was now dull and forever nullified. Somewhere outside the room someone was laughing.

I didn’t know at the time that I was standing on the wrong side of the slab to see his wounds. He had been clobbered twice behind his left ear, and when I saw him I was on his right side. Later the police would show me photos taken at the murder scene that illustrated how copiously he had bled out. The tableau of that scene gave the impression that chocolate sauce had been sprayed all over the place. It wasn’t like movie blood, red and vibrant. It was dark and thick.

The mass that looked like my dad, motionless as though he were having his makeup applied before filming, still didn’t seem real. Was this the musician who played the drums with such passion and abandon? Was this the radio comedian who always had a quick-witted response to any situation? Was this the dad who created an entire baseball league we played in our swimming pool over several summers? Was this Dad? Motionless.
Cold. Humorless. Was my dad dead? It was impossible. We had a lot of stuff to do together yet.

After taking one more frame for my mind’s eye, I turned away from that cadaver impersonating my dad. From that moment on, there would only be the long wait for answers.

6

My dad, dubbed the KNXtrovert Bob Crane by the radio station, enjoyed most of his guests, though actor Glenn Ford once asked no one in particular, “What am I doing here?” A relationship developed with some of them leading to multiple appearances every year: composers Henry Mancini and Bronislau Kaper; comedians Bill Dana (aka Jose Jimenez), Phyllis Diller, and Steve Allen; singers John Gary, Carol Lawrence, and Wayne Newton. He looked forward to having one guest in particular—Carl Reiner, the writer, producer, and actor who had just created
The Dick Van Dyke Show
.

My dad, like millions of other television viewers, admired the
Van Dyke Show.
The series was the classiest of its day, featuring wonderful dialogue for the talented actors and actresses and creating troublesome but clever situations from which the Petries (Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore) had to extricate themselves. Reiner always spent an enjoyable hour swapping quips with the whizbang host who asked him saucy questions about Van Dyke and Moore, tickled his commercials with gimmicks, drummed along with one or two records, and generally had fun so god-awful early in the morning. Reiner always liked Bob Crane, whose nuttiness reminded him of Sid Caesar and Howie Morris.

Reiner took a flyer by casting my dad, based on an hour-long audition at KNX, in the guest role of a philandering husband in the upcoming “Somebody Has to Play Cleopatra” episode of the
Van Dyke Show.
Any actor chalking up a guest role on the Emmy-winning
Dick Van Dyke Show
noted a quick uptick in his or her career. The guest appearance was exactly what my dad wanted at that point. Working with Van Dyke, Moore, Reiner, producer Sheldon Leonard, and director John Rich—this was the Big Leagues.

My mom and I attended the filming at Desilu Cahuenga. There were three cameras, each loaded with ten-minute magazines, shooting in front
of a live audience. Roles like my dad’s part, of the good-time, life-of-the-party friend and/or neighbor, had always been abundantly in demand in television and film. Tony Randall and Gig Young had based careers on this seemingly simple role. Again, my dad fed off of the immediate laughter of the three hundred spectators in the bleachers. The response that Martin Ragaway’s clever and snappy dialogue elicited suddenly made every hour on the air in Hornell, New York, every appearance at the Chamber of Commerce luncheons, every elephant race on the Ventura Freeway worth it.

My dad’s performance caught the attention of Donna Reed’s husband/producer, Tony Owen, who was producing
The Donna Reed Show
on ABC (everyone in the industry watched the
Van Dyke Show
). If
The Dick Van Dyke Show
was a dry martini with a couple of olives,
The Donna Reed Show
was lukewarm milk. It had been running for five years and was starting to curdle. It badly needed either an infusion of fresh, sassy honey or to be left to turn into yogurt. Owen and Reed were looking for a couple of new supporting characters for Reed and came up with Dr. Dave Kelsey (a cohort of Carl Betz’s character) and his wife. Owen made an offer to my dad and Ann McCrea to play the roles in a seven out of thirteen episodes deal. That meant they would appear on the show every other week. If a season consisted of twenty-six episodes, my dad and McCrea would bring their neighborly charms to fourteen of them. Owen and Reed were sly show business veterans, but while they wanted new kids in town, they weren’t prepared for the strong, pure energy that was about to be unleashed on the stale, tired series.

Donna Reed was a big-time Hollywood actress who had won a Supporting Oscar for her role in
From Here To Eternity
and had costarred with Jimmy Stewart in
It’s a Wonderful Life.
My dad certainly appreciated her stature, but after filming a couple of episodes he became acutely aware that
The Donna Reed Show
was not
The Dick Van Dyke Show.
The writing was sweet but corny, and certainly not at all hip. It was a one-camera show. There was no live audience, and an irritating laugh track tried to spice up the otherwise unfunny dialogue and situations. It was a comfortable but unexciting program. The veteran crew just went through the motions and cashed their weekly checks. Most of them had probably been around since Harry Cohn ran the Columbia Studios lot. On the plus side, my dad could continue to do the morning KNX show, then walk fewer than a hundred yards diagonally across the street and enter Columbia
Pictures, where
The Reed Show
was filmed. He was off the air at 9:55 and in makeup by 10:00. He was making more money than he or his relatives back in Connecticut could ever have imagined. He had the number one morning radio show in Southern California and was a regular on a network series working with a motion picture star. The only problem was that my dad couldn’t resign himself to performing pap after his
Dick Van Dyke
experience.

After that first season on
The Donna Reed Show,
my dad continued his emulation of Jack Paar by telling stories out of school about working on the Reed set. Producer Tony Owen didn’t appreciate his smart-alecky candor. He felt the young upstart was biting the hand that partially fed him. Owen had given him an opportunity most youngish actors would have given their capped teeth for, but my dad wanted to be Dick Van Dyke or Jack Lemmon or Gig Young, and just couldn’t settle for Carl Betz.

It was a snake pit audience at the Crane household. My mom was just happy that my dad was working and making good money. My grandmother Nan was still figuring out how my dad could appear on television while he was home watching it. My five-year-old sister Debbie and I (thirteen) sensed my dad’s frustration with the bland scripts and acting style of
The Donna Reed Show,
and we seized every opportunity to pile on disdain for the entire enterprise like a couple of linebackers jumping on the stack of players after the whistle. Our baby sibling Karen was four and more accepting of the show’s sugarcoating. Debbie and I made loud, obnoxious comments about how corny the show was, with little knowledge of or respect for how difficult an actor’s life was. We were a despicable audience, rude to my dad. He was doing the best he could with what he had to work with. It was not his series, he didn’t write it, and he was just a supporting character. His earnings put our family in a comfortable zone, and we were ungrateful wiseasses. Unable to resist his own instincts, my dad related some of his children’s worst insults about the
Reed Show
on his radio program, and of course, Owen and Reed heard about it. Tony Owen, rightfully, didn’t appreciate the bad-mouthing, but he allowed my dad to play out his two-year contract. Ann McCrea remained a wacky neighbor without a wacky doctor husband after those two seasons.

If
The Donna Reed Show
was a mediocre cloud, then at least it had a bronze lining. After my dad got the heave-ho, his agent at William Morris called him and said, “Bob, have I got an interesting script for you. Prisoner
of war camp during World War II. Nazi commandant, German shepherds, gun towers, the whole strudel.” This was late 1964.

My dad said, “Thanks, but I want to do comedy. I want to be Dick Van Dyke. I want to be Jack Lemmon. I want to be Gig Young. I’m not a dramatic actor.”

“Bob, what are you talking about?” the agent said. “This
is
a comedy. These are the funny Nazis.”

“The Heroes,” as
Hogan’s Heroes
was originally titled, was created by Bernard Fein and Albert Ruddy, who would later produce the Oscar-winning Best Pictures
The Godfather
and
Million Dollar Baby.
In its first incarnation the show was set in a contemporary federal prison. Fein and Ruddy took it to ABC, where they did not get a lot of interest from the executives in their funny thieves, rapists, and murderers. The premise just didn’t work, so they rewrote it, borrowing heavily from
Stalag 17,
a Billy Wilder film starring William Holden. There was a Sergeant Schultz in
Stalag 17,
and there was a Sergeant Schultz in “The Heroes.” But what really made it work was filching a little bit from the James Bond franchise,
since
Dr. No, From Russia with Love,
and
Goldfinger
had all recently been huge hits.

The idea was to have the POWs at Stalag 13 create all kinds of whizbang gadgets, all in the service of getting the better of their nincompoop captors—the Allied prisoners would be running their own base of clandestine and underground operations from a POW camp during WWII. The creators renamed the show
Hogan’s Heroes
after Colonel Hogan, the American officer who led his crazy quilt of captives—the Frenchman LeBeau, the Cockney Newkirk, the Americans Carter and Kinchloe, and whichever guest stars happened to drop in at the Stalag that week—on various exploits. Originally, they also had a Russian POW who was played by an actor named Leonid Kinsky, but it turned out he was too old for the group, so they let him go after shooting the pilot.

The pilot was shot in black-and-white, the interiors at Paramount Studios and the exteriors at 40 Acres/Desilu in Culver City. It was the last pilot made and the first pilot sold for CBS’s new fall 1965 season. William Paley and the executives at Blackrock, CBS headquarters on Fifty-second Street in Manhattan, were ecstatic. They loved it. They were jumping into the troop movement started two years earlier by
The Great Escape,
a huge hit set in a German prisoner of war camp and starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, and an all-star international cast, and 1965’s
Von Ryan’s Express,
which starred Frank Sinatra and was set in an Italian POW camp.

In television and motion pictures, the stories, trends, and stars run in cycles, so it made sense that CBS would hop on the POW bandwagon, albeit employing relative unknowns and a weekly schedule. Blackrock hoped a large viewing audience would root for the Allied prisoners serving their countries by conducting missions behind enemy lines. They would blow up bridges, steal secrets, and generally confound the enemy, all with a laugh track. The stark black-and-white cinematography helped with the look of the pilot episode, but more and more TV series were going to color so, of course,
Hogan’s
had to be in color as well. I never thought
Hogan’s Heroes
and
Combat!
looked as good in color as they did in black-and-white, but they had to conform for commercial reasons. Viewers were buying color television sets, and damn it, they wanted color programming.