When the Tube Dims

People appreciate order in their lives. We like to believe that Hollywood deaths follow the rule of three. When one shoe drops, we anticipate two more to fall. Last summer, however, in just over a month’s span, seven talented performers – mostly known for their work in television – passed away. The Moviehouse pays tribute to those gone in a series of snapshots.

Gerald S. O’Loughlin, who died July 31, 2015, at age 93, is best remembered as Lt. Eddie Ryker, the tough-talking mentor of three police academy cadets in the 1970s TV series “The Rookies.” The success of the best-selling novels The New Centurions and The Blue Knight by Los Angeles cop-turned-author Joseph Wambaugh inspired a more realistic depiction of uniformed patrolmen in movies and on television. As opposed to the cardboard characterizations in “Adam-12,” “The Rookies,” helmed by prolific executive producer Aaron Spelling, strove to humanize the image of the beat cop. (Wambaugh himself would create the 1973 anthology series “Police Story.”)

 

Lt. Ryker (Gerald S. O'Loughlin) is flanked by fledgling policemen
Willie Gillis (Michael Ontkean), Mike Danko (Sam Melville), and
Terry Webster (Georg Stanford Brown) in a publicity photo for "The
Rookies." By series' end, future "Charlie's Angels" costar Kate
Jackson, who portrayed Danko's wife and registered nurse Jill
Danko, was receving the the lion's share of the show's fan mail.

On June 22, 1944, at the height of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (popularly called the GI Bill) to provide financial aid for returning soldiers, offering free tuition, room and board for any veteran wishing to continue their education.  Surprisingly, hundreds have since taken advantage of the GI Bill to pursue acting training, including Harry Belafonte, Richard Boone, Johnny Carson, Bill Cosby, Tony Curtis, Robert Duvall, Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Jack Klugman, Walter Matthau, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Rod Steiger, Eli Wallach, James Whitmore, and Gerald S. O’Loughlin (pronounced O-lock-lin), who served as a Marine lieutenant during World War II and the post-war occupation of Japan.

O’Loughlin’s career in theater, television, and film was marked by hard-edged portrayals of cops, hoodlums, convicts, and GIs - little guys pushed around by bad luck or bad women. Not exactly off-Broadway or on-Broadway, he portrayed Stanley Kowalski in a 1956 staging of Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” featuring Tallulah Bankhead (best known as the cynical columnist in Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime drama “Lifeboat”) as Blanche DuBois.

 

Gerald S. O'Loughlin shares the stage with Tallulah
Bankhead in "A Streetcar Named Desire."

In a 2011 interview, O’Loughlin said of Bankhead, who was 19 years his senior, “Close up, she looked like my grandmother. But I tried not to wince…And she looked me dead in the eye, knowing full well what’s going on in my mind, and said, ‘Just you remember, young man, I had a one-night stand with Gary Cooper!’” As related by O’Loughlin, a drunk Williams stumbled through the audience during an intermission, slurring, “Miss Bankhead is pissin’ on mah play!”

Among O’Loughlin’s other stage roles was Cheswick in a 1963 production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” during which he also understudied Kirk Douglas’ lead role of McMurphy. In 1967, he had a small but pivotal role as one of the detectives who arrest the killers in “In Cold Blood,” the documentary-like drama based on Truman Capote’s best-selling book about the 1959 murder of  four family members in a Kansas farming community. When O’Loughlin learned that the real-life officer he was portraying had a sinus problem, he wanted to play his scenes with a handkerchief in hand. No-nonsense director Richard Brooks (“Bite the Bullet”) muttered, “What the fuck is that?” O’Loughlin recalled, “In the end he let it go.”

 

(Left) John Forsythe (as Alvin Dewey) and (right) Gerald S. O"Loughlin (as
Harold Nye) pose with actors Robert Blake and Scott Wilson (as convicted
killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock) on-location for "In Cold Blood."

One of O’Loughlin’s favorite screen roles was in the 1977 political thriller “Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” directed by Robert Aldrich (“The Dirty Dozen”) and based on the novel Viper Three by Walter Wager, whose other books inspired the movies “Telefon” and “Die Hard 2.” Burt Lancaster stars as a renegade United States Air Force general who leads an escape from a military prison to take over an ICBM silo and threatens to launch nine Titan missiles if the President of the U.S. doesn’t make public a classified National Security Council document revealing the true nature of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. There is also a demand for several million dollars and passage out of the country on Air Force One with the president as hostage.

 

Gerald S. O'Loughlin shares a scene in "Twilight's Last Gleaming" with Hollywood
veterans William Marshall and Charles McGraw. "I had a special toupee made," the
actor told an interviewer, "a kind of half-assed crewcut." Director Robert Aldrich,
whom O'Loughlin praised as "terrific" and "an all-time great," told O'Loughlin,
"I've got to tell you, ordinarily I hate toupees, but that one is great."

Charles Durning delivers a bravura performance as the fictitious president in "Twilight's Last Gleaming." O’Loughlin, who portrays a brigadier general, said in an interview, “I was like Alexander Haig had been for Nixon, an old buddy…I have a scene with Charles Durning where I bawl him out.” When Durning balks at offering himself as a hostage, O’Loughlin barks, “It’s who you are! It’s the job. It goes with the territory. You’re the fucking president! Nobody else is going to take your place…Of course you’re scared – who wouldn’t be? Forget right, wrong, justice, or any of that bullshit. You live here, you gotta go... asshole!” O’Loughlin said, “It’s a great scene.”

“I sort of enjoyed being a lieutenant on ‘The Rookies,’” O’Loughlin would recall, “maybe because I was a lieutenant in the Marine Corps.” He said, “I think I was sort of a father figure, and was a little bit distanced...but on good terms.” After “The Rookies,” he was offered the starring role of Captain Stubing on “The Love Boat,” but the “insulted” actor insisted, “I play lieutenants…I don’t play captains on an excursion cruiser!... ‘The Rookies’ was so embedded in me, I scorned the other one. Today, I wish I had not reacted that way. I’d have a couple million dollars.”

Initially trained as a ballet dancer, Yvonne Craig (pictured above), who was 78 when she succumbed to metastatic breast cancer that spread to her liver on August 17, appeared in two Elvis Presley musicals – 1963’s “It Happened at the World’s Fair” and 1964’s “Kissin’ Cousins” – and gained undying cult status as an exotic, green-skinned slave named Marta in the 1969 episode of “Star Trek” titled “Whom Gods Destroy.”

 

(Left) Dodge car commercial spokesmodel Pamela Austin and Yvonne Craig
tempt G.I. Elvis Presley in "Kissin' Cousins"; (right) a lime-fleshed Craig
tempts William Shatner's Captain Kirk in "Star Trek."

Craig is probably best remembered as Batgirl (the crime-fighting alter ego of the daughter of Gotham City Police Commissioner Gordon) on the third and final season of the campy ABC-TV series “Batman” in 1967. The network added Batgirl to the cast in a last-ditch effort to “attract new audience members, especially idealistic young girls and less high-minded older men.” No small part of that appeal to “less high-minded older men” had to be Batgirl’s skintight costume, a clinging getup made of stretch lamé.

At the time, women were not allowed to engage in depictions of hand-to-hand combat on television, so the show’s producers choreographed Batgirl’s fights like Broadway showgirl routines, taking advantage of Craig’s ballet background.

In probably one of show business' most bizarre series of publicity photos, "Batman"
Adam West and "Batgirl" Yvonne Craig cavort off the set of the kitschy TV series.

Craig's classical dance experience also paid off when she was cast as a Russian ballerina in 1967’s “In Like Flint,” a sequel to the 1966 James Bond spoof “Our Man Flint,” both starring James Coburn as ultra-cool super-spy Derek Flint. Craig shares the Bolshoi stage with a leotard-clad Coburn in one scene – climaxed by a hilarious, gravity-defying leap by the latter – and frugs to a clanging rock guitar in the next, declaring, “Your American music is so decadent!”

Bud Yorkin, who passed away at age 89 on August 18, might be an unfamiliar name to a lot of people, but he was, particularly in partnership with Norman Lear, one of the most successful producers in television history. A popular and in-demand director during TV’s Golden Age, Yorkin worked with such musical variety stars as Jack Benny, Dinah Shore, and Tennessee Ernie Ford. His 1958 television special “An Evening with Fred Astaire” garnered nine Emmy Awards. That same year, Yorkin joined with writer-producer Norman Lear to form Tandem Productions.

Yorkin, who once explained, “We called ourselves Tandem because we think of ourselves as two guys on a bicycle going uphill,” was a producer on the hit sitcoms “All in the Family,” “Good Times,” and “Sanford and Son.” In the 1970s, The New York Times proclaimed Yorkin and Lear as the “two millionaire kings of television.”  Following Yorkin’s passing, Norman Lear said, “His was the horse we rode in on, and I couldn’t love or appreciate him more.”

Bud Yorkin (left) poses for a photograph with Rob Reiner and Norman Lear.

After his split with Lear, Yorkin produced the “Sanford and Son” spinoff “Grady,” as well as “What’s Happening!” and “Carter Country.” Yorkin occasionally dabbled in directing films, beginning with the 1963 Frank Sinatra comedy “Come Blow Your Horn,” co-produced and scripted by Norman Lear, based on a Neil Simon play. With Yorkin as director, Lear also co-wrote and produced the 1967 romantic comedy “Divorce American Style,” starring Dick Van Dyke and Debbie Reynolds.  A clunker in Yorkin’s career occurred in 1968 with “Inspector Clouseau,” with an embarrassed Alan Arkin slumming in the role made famous by Peter Sellers in the “Pink Panther” franchise.

Donald Sutherland and Gene Wilder portray the haughty DeSisi twins in the
cult comedy classic "Start the Revolution Without Me," directed by Bud Yorkin.

In 1970, Bud Yorkin produced and directed “Start the Revolution Without Me,” a sporadically hysterical mishmash of The Corsican Brothers, The Man in the Iron Mask, and A Tale of Two Cities that uncannily presaged, by a number of years, the genre parodies of Mel Brooks, including “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein.” Set during the French Revolution, the film features Donald Sutherland and Mel Brooks favorite Gene Wilder as two sets of identical twins accidentally switched at birth, one mismatched pair raised in poverty, the other in aristocracy. Hugh Griffith, the venerable Welsh-born character actor who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as an Arab sheik in “Ben-Hur,” steals the picture in a deliriously inspired portrait of King Louis XVI as a hapless buffoon.

Dressed as a giant chicken, a befuddled Louis XVI (Hugh Griffith, alongside Billie
Whitelaw, as Marie Antoinette) mumbles, "I thought it was a costume ball."

Yorkin subsequently directed “The Thief Who Came to Dinner,” a 1973 heist drama starring Ryan O’Neal and Jacqueline Bisset, co-produced by Norman Lear with a script by Walter Hill, 1985’s “Twice in a Lifetime,” featuring Gene Hackman and Ann-Margret, and “Arthur 2: On the Rocks,” the 1988 sequel to the 1981 hit comedy, reuniting Liza Minnelli with Dudley Moore, who publicly disowned the film while screenwriter Andy Breckman personally apologized to theatergoers.

When Melody Patterson, who was best known for her portrayal of Wrangler Jane, the feisty postmaster and shopkeeper with a knack for sharpshooting on the ‘60s sitcom “F Troop,” died from multiple organ failure at the age of 66 on August 20, her costar, Larry Storch (now 92), posted on Facebook, “It’s with a heavy heart that we…let you know our beloved Wrangler Jane passed away…Our hearts are sad today. RIP sweet Melody. We love you.”

Melody Patterson clowns with Larry Storch
on the set of "F Troop."

Born in Inglewood, California, Melody Patterson joined a community theater troupe at five. She was just shy of her 16^th birthday when she auditioned for “F Troop.” No script was ready yet, so she was asked to read dialogue from the Doris Day musical comedy “Calamity Jane,” which happened to be one of Patterson’s favorite movies. She lied to the producers that she was 18, and it was only after a half-dozen episodes had been shot that the truth came out. The rowdy male cast, including former standup comic Storch and veteran Hollywood tough guy Forrest Tucker, was subsequently warned to curb their salty off-camera banter. “They were wonderful to me,” she recalled. “I was the little baby.”

(Clockwise from upper left) Larry Storch, Forrest Tucker,
Melody Patterson, and Ken Berry star in "F Troop."

“F Troop,” which aired for two seasons from 1965 to 1967, was as close as ‘60s sitcoms came to classic vaudeville, featuring corny jokes, pratfalls, slapstick, and over-the-top (often racially offensive) characters. The roster of guest stars read like a roll call of old-school comedians, including Milton Berle, Phil Harris, Don Rickles, George Gobel, Paul Lynde, Harvey Korman, and Charley Weaver (Cliff Arquette).

Reflecting on her ingenuous pursuit of the clueless Captain Parmenter (Ken Berry), Patterson would say, “It wasn’t raunchy. It was an innocent sexy.” During the show’s second season, when Patterson turned 17, her character became more aggressive, prompting Parmenter, at one point, to protest, “Jane, you’ll bend my sword.” In a 2001 interview, she noted, “It was a magical chemisitry between two people.”

Melody Patterson strikes a cheesecake pose.

After “F Troop” ended its run, Patterson broadcast a daily show on Armed Forces Radio for American troops in Vietnam. In 1970, she married actor James MacArthur, whom she had met on the set of “The Angry Breed” (1968) a Vietnam era biker flick. When MacArthur was cast on the original “Hawaii Five-O” (where his character inspired the catchphrase “Book ‘im, Danno!”), she guest-starred on three episodes of the police series.

In 1969, 20-year-old Melody Patterson attempted to change her girl-next-door persona with a role as a chick involved with a biker gang in “The Cycle Savages.” Stone-faced, emotionally challenged leading man Chris Robinson (familiar to fans of daytime drama as handsome Rick Webber on “General Hospital,” as handsome Jason Frame on “Another World,” and as handsome Jack Hamilton on “The Bold and the Beautiful”) plays an artist who treads on the wrong toes when he sketches a motorcycle gang.

Chris Robinson and Bruce Dern get better acquainted in "The Cycle Savages."

Sadistic gang leader Bruce Dern (who else?) wants to crush the artist’s hands, explaining, “We don’t like people watching us. And that includes drawing pictures.” As a decoy for the thugs, Patterson tells the pencil-man, “I’ll let you draw me with no clothes on. I mean, you can draw me naked if you want.” When Wrangler Jane strips down to full dorsal nudity, the artist mutters, “I wonder if this ever happened to Rembrandt.”

Wrangler Jane is all growed up in "The Cycle Savages."

Casey Kasem, “American Top 40” countdown host, has one poolside scene as Dern’s brother, the leader of a white slavery ring in a puffy shirt (pictured below). Kasem, in fact, was an executive producer, along with record executive Mike Curb, on “The Cycle Savages.” (Kasem, who portrayed Bruce Dern’s best friend in 1971’s “The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant,” also co-produced the 1967 cycle flick “The Glory Stompers,” starring Dennis Hopper.)

Melody Patterson followed up “The Cycle Savages” in 1971 with “Blood and Lace,” which The New York Times dismissed as “a low-grade exercise in shadows, screams, traumas and slayings that are largely more laughable than shocking.” Set in an improbably foreboding orphanage, the lurid thriller-wannabe costars faded film noir veteran Gloria Grahame, Len Lesser (best known as Uncle Leo on “Seinfeld” and as Frank Barone’s lodge buddy Garvin on “Everybody Loves Raymond”), and Vic Tayback (best known as the owner of Mel’s Diner in the Martin Scorsese film “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and its sitcom spinoff “Alice”).

To be honest, after the tedium and bleakness of “The Cycle Savages,” the suffocating shroud of relentless nihilism in “Blood and Lace” forced the Moviehouse to expeditiously yank the film out of the projection booth before its dour denouement. We didn’t even bother to hang around long enough to see if Wrangler Jane got nekkid again.

In an episode inspired by "The Beverly Hillbillies," Melody Patterson portrays
a feuding backwoods girl named Ella Mae on "The Monkees," with Davy Jones.

Patterson eventually directed regional theater and wrote a column for “Wildest Westerns,” a magazine devoted to TV and movie westerns. Online, she recalled “F Troop” as “the biggest thrill” of her career.

Dean Jones, who succumbed to Parkinson’s disease on September 1, age 84, became a familiar face in numerous Walt Disney productions as a successor to Fred MacMurray, whose own flagging career was revitalized when Disney cast the likable father figure in “The Shaggy Dog,” “The Absent-Minded Professor,” and “Son of Flubber.” Walt Disney personally recruited Jones after being impressed by the actor’s performance  as the Navy prankster in the TV series “Ensign O’Toole.” From 1965 to 1977, Jones starred in such Disney films as “That Darn Cat!” (Jones also had a cameo in the 1997 remake, which starred Christina Ricci), “The Love Bug,” “The Shaggy D.A.” (reprising Fred MacMurray’s role from “The Shaggy Dog”), and “Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo.”

After a drunk-driving accident, Dean Jones became a devout born-again Christian in 1973, so it was not surprising that in the 1978 film “Born Again,” he portrayed Charles Colson, a special counsel to President Richard Nixon (nicknamed Nixon’s “hatchet man”) who was one of the imprisoned Watergate Seven and later became an Evangelical Chirstian. Continuing to appear in mainstream movies like “Other People’s Money,” with Danny DeVito and Gregory Peck, “Beethoven,” and “Clear and Present Danger,” starring Harrison Ford, Jones founded the Christian Rescue Committee in 1998, an organization that provides a “way of escape to Jews, Christians, and others persecuted for their faith.”

On the small screen, Dean Jones gave an acclaimed performance in the 1978 nade-for-television drama "When Every Day Was the Fourth of July," a semi-autobiographcal roman a clef written, produced, and directed by Dan Curtis, a prolific producer-director best known for the gothic soap opera "Dark Shadows," the TV horror anthology film "Trilogy of Terror," starring Karen Black, and the epic World War II miniseries "The Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance." In a slice of 1930s Americana - with more than a passing resemblance to "To Kill a Mockingbird" - Jones portrays a lawyer who defends the town misfit, a brain-damaged World War I veteran nicknamed "Snowman" (a brilliantly nuanced performance by Geoffrey Lewis), in a murder trial (pictured below). The television movie was so popular that director Curtis reteamed with Jones for a 1980 sequel, "The Long Days of Summer."

"The Simpsons" creator Matt Groening told an interviewer that his first job
in Los Angeles was as an extra in "When Every Day Was the Fourth of July."

Judy Carne, forever endeared as the Sock-It-To-Me Girl on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” died of pneumonia at the age of 76 on September 3. Blissfully oblivious, she would chirp, “It’s sock-it-to-me time!” before being mercilessly doused with a deluge of water, bopped by an oversize boxing glove, or dropped through a trapdoor.

Judy Carne appeared on two episodes of "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."
with Robert Vaughn.

Born in Northampton, England, the daughter of British greengrocers moved to the U.S. in the early 1960s. In his 1994 autobiography, actor Burt Reynolds, who had met the aspiring actress on a flight, recalled her as “this little girl flitting about like Peter Pan. She had short hair, a bright smile, and a cute body. She was too cute for her own good. Judy was an outrageous flirt.” The two wed in 1963.

Less than three years later, the marriage was over. While Judy Carne would claim her husband was abusive, Burt Reynolds, in his autobiography, depicted himself as the noble sufferer. “I saw she was already headed down that dirty road of drug addiction. And so I said, 'I’m leaving. Please try to be good to yourself.’” According to Burt, Judy’s parting words were, “We’ll always be friends. You can always jump on my bones, you know.”

Wait, Mr. Reynolds isn’t done yet. “I know she still cares a little about me,” he wrote. “She sometimes claims that I beat her, other times she says I was a saint…some scumbag pays her to say things that get her drug money. She is forever showing up on talk shows, looking totally zooey.”

Carne herself would note, “Actors and actresses shouldn’t be together. Each is so involved in himself that there isn’t room at the dinner table for the two of them.”

Judy Carne shares the "Laugh-In" stage
with Reverend Billy Graham.

Judy Carne left “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” after the second season in 1970, complaining that the show had become “a big bloody bore” and alleging that passersbys would douse her with water on the street. She feared she would become typecast and wanted to showcase her talents as a singer and dancer. After starring in a 1970 Broadway revival of “The Boy Friend,” reprising a role originated by Julie Andrews, she became a show regular on the club circuit in Las Vegas, during which time her free-spirited lifestyle led to a relationship with Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry.

A near-fatal car crash in the summer of 1978 that left Judy Carne with a broken neck, virtually ending her career and leading to drug addiction, prompted her to remark, “I guess this is the ultimate sock-it-to-me.” Her final screen role was as a homeless woman in the 1993 independent movie “What About Me,” featuring punk icons Gregory Corso, Richard Hell, Dee Dee Ramone, Rockets Redglare, and Johnny Thunders.

For a single season in 1967, Judy Carne and Pete Duel portray
a pair of San Francisco newlyweds in "Love on a Rooftop."

“She was born at the wrong time,” Burt Reynolds sagaciously noted. “She can sing, she can act, and she can dance, but no one is making ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ anymore.” Oh, shut up.

Martin Milner, who was 83 when de died of heart failure September 6, rolled into TV fame twice, first, from 1960 to 1964, as a costar on the legendary road series “Route 66” and then, from 1968 to 1975, as a costar, along with Kent McCord, on the police drama “Adam-12.”

Countdown: George Maharis and Martin Milner hit the road in "Route 66" (left);
Kent McCord and Martin Milner patrol the streets of LA in "Adam-12" (right)

Milner’s acting career began with a series of portrayals of baby-faced recruits in such World War II dramas as “Sands of Iwo Jima” (1949), starring John Wayne, “Halls of Montezuma” (1951), featuring Richard Wiidmark, “Operation Pacific” (1951), again with John Wayne, and “Mister Roberts” (1955), starring Henry Fonda.

Martin Milner played Patty Duke’s betrayed husband in the 1967 screen adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s best-selling novel Valley of the Dolls. Milner’s performance was summarily dismissed in Roger Ebert’s review when the critic commented, “As for the young men in the cast, they all apparently go to the same barber and tailor…I couldn’t tell them apart.”

Martin Milner performs in a scene from "Valley of the Dolls"
with Sharon Tate and Patty Duke.

In 1960, Martin Milner took on the role of the first half of the title characters in “The Private Lives of Adam and Eve” (1960), a leering burlesque co-directed by Mickey Rooney, who mugs mercilessly onscreen as The Devil. In her 1987 autobiography, Mamie Van Doren, a post-Marilyn Monroe blonde bombshell cast as Eve, complained about undergoing a daily ritual of having “lifelike balloon-rubber covers…glued over my breasts, my hair glued down to the rubber,” with a fern “glued in place over my belly button,” while, as Adam, Milner (pictured below) paraded through their scenes in a skimpy loincloth. “Marty liked me, and I knew it,” Van Doren remembered, “but he didn’t really trip my trigger.”