Crane by Robert Crane and Christopher Fryer Page A
Authors: Robert Crane and Christopher Fryer
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like hours of haggling I was allowed into the apartment—provided that the first night I was there the guard stayed inside the apartment too.
I went into my bedroom and locked the door. It was surreal to me that my dad had just been killed by person or persons unknown while he slept, and here I was in my apartment all night with a gun-toting stranger in the next room. I didn’t sleep much that night, either.
12
Divorce, Tarzana Style, 1968–1969
The role of the lothario had hovered over my dad’s career since his walk-on in
The New Interns
as Drunk Guy at Party with up-and-coming contract players like George Segal, Michael Callan, and Stefanie Powers. That epic was shot at Columbia Pictures at Sunset and Gower across the street from his morning gig at KNX and was an early opportunity for him to spend a few hours on a set. From there it was the break offered by Carl Reiner to appear as a philandering husband on
The Dick Van Dyke Show
followed by two seasons as Carl Betz’s good-time dentist friend on
The Donna Reed Show.
Then there was Colonel Hogan, a role that was as close to playing his hero, Jack Lemmon, as my dad would ever experience. Besides squeezing out some Lemmon, my dad gave Hogan the appropriate look of the day—a combination of James Garner, Robert Culp, Robert Vaughn, Robert Conrad, and Gig Young.
After a few seasons of
Hogan’s Heroes,
which by then was a well-oiled machine and a favorite at Black Rock in Manhattan, my dad jumped at the chance to costar in a motion picture with the red-hot European bomb-shell Elke Sommer. The script for
The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz
had never had any fingerprints of Garner, Culp, Vaughn, Conrad, or Young on it because it was toxic. The film was directed by George Marshall, a Hollywood veteran in his seventies who had distinguished himself with the likes of Laurel and Hardy, Bob Hope, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, but who was not fully connected to the hip late 1960s. His style of filmmaking and the look of the film, with its limp attempts at comedy, were relics of the ’40s and ’50s. Sommer was a nonactress who had appeared nude in many of her films as a way of unleashing her thespian gifts. She had graced the pages of
Playboy
magazine, which was why I was personally enthused about visiting the set. The director, the crew, the script, shooting at the nearly shuttered MGM lot, all cried archaic, antiquated, and out of touch. As a last-ditch effort to salvage some kind ofbox office viability, the producer threw in Werner Klemperer, John Banner, and Leon Askin from
Hogan’s
in an effort to inject some lifeblood into an otherwise DOA project.
My dad, playing an American conman in cold war Germany instead of World War II Germany, knew the film was a dinosaur in both method and message. This was 1968, and the
New York Times
made the intriguing choice of feminist author Renata Adler to review the film. She wrote on behalf of her sisters and the changes in the air for women’s rights when she pointed out just how old-fashioned, chauvinistic, and downright dreadful the story and depiction of women were and how the film’s male characters (specifically my dad) were Neanderthal in their dealings with women. I hurt for my dad, who didn’t know Gloria Steinem from Mamie Van Doren. What he did know was that his smile couldn’t make up for such a vulgar script. His charm reserve tank had nowhere near the capacity to keep that baby rolling. Colonel Hogan was a winner because solid dialogue and situations propped him up and producer Ed Feldman served as quality-control inspector.
Even with as much skin as Elke Sommer could display, Paula Schulz’s wicked dreams turned into a nightmare. United Artists dumped the film out in February, when most feral dogs are released. My dad took his costar billing, his check, and a fistful of bad notices and hightailed it back to his day job.
In spite of the
Paula Schulz
debacle, a year later my dad was offered and accepted the
I went into my bedroom and locked the door. It was surreal to me that my dad had just been killed by person or persons unknown while he slept, and here I was in my apartment all night with a gun-toting stranger in the next room. I didn’t sleep much that night, either.
12
Divorce, Tarzana Style, 1968–1969
The role of the lothario had hovered over my dad’s career since his walk-on in
The New Interns
as Drunk Guy at Party with up-and-coming contract players like George Segal, Michael Callan, and Stefanie Powers. That epic was shot at Columbia Pictures at Sunset and Gower across the street from his morning gig at KNX and was an early opportunity for him to spend a few hours on a set. From there it was the break offered by Carl Reiner to appear as a philandering husband on
The Dick Van Dyke Show
followed by two seasons as Carl Betz’s good-time dentist friend on
The Donna Reed Show.
Then there was Colonel Hogan, a role that was as close to playing his hero, Jack Lemmon, as my dad would ever experience. Besides squeezing out some Lemmon, my dad gave Hogan the appropriate look of the day—a combination of James Garner, Robert Culp, Robert Vaughn, Robert Conrad, and Gig Young.
After a few seasons of
Hogan’s Heroes,
which by then was a well-oiled machine and a favorite at Black Rock in Manhattan, my dad jumped at the chance to costar in a motion picture with the red-hot European bomb-shell Elke Sommer. The script for
The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz
had never had any fingerprints of Garner, Culp, Vaughn, Conrad, or Young on it because it was toxic. The film was directed by George Marshall, a Hollywood veteran in his seventies who had distinguished himself with the likes of Laurel and Hardy, Bob Hope, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, but who was not fully connected to the hip late 1960s. His style of filmmaking and the look of the film, with its limp attempts at comedy, were relics of the ’40s and ’50s. Sommer was a nonactress who had appeared nude in many of her films as a way of unleashing her thespian gifts. She had graced the pages of
Playboy
magazine, which was why I was personally enthused about visiting the set. The director, the crew, the script, shooting at the nearly shuttered MGM lot, all cried archaic, antiquated, and out of touch. As a last-ditch effort to salvage some kind ofbox office viability, the producer threw in Werner Klemperer, John Banner, and Leon Askin from
Hogan’s
in an effort to inject some lifeblood into an otherwise DOA project.
My dad, playing an American conman in cold war Germany instead of World War II Germany, knew the film was a dinosaur in both method and message. This was 1968, and the
New York Times
made the intriguing choice of feminist author Renata Adler to review the film. She wrote on behalf of her sisters and the changes in the air for women’s rights when she pointed out just how old-fashioned, chauvinistic, and downright dreadful the story and depiction of women were and how the film’s male characters (specifically my dad) were Neanderthal in their dealings with women. I hurt for my dad, who didn’t know Gloria Steinem from Mamie Van Doren. What he did know was that his smile couldn’t make up for such a vulgar script. His charm reserve tank had nowhere near the capacity to keep that baby rolling. Colonel Hogan was a winner because solid dialogue and situations propped him up and producer Ed Feldman served as quality-control inspector.
Even with as much skin as Elke Sommer could display, Paula Schulz’s wicked dreams turned into a nightmare. United Artists dumped the film out in February, when most feral dogs are released. My dad took his costar billing, his check, and a fistful of bad notices and hightailed it back to his day job.
In spite of the
Paula Schulz
debacle, a year later my dad was offered and accepted the
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