PASSINGS...

It’s one thing when famous people pass away; it’s another when performers who have been part of our consciousness for most of our lives leave our midst.  Gregory Peck, Katharine Hepburn, Bob Hope, Buddy Ebsen and Buddy Hackett were all major figures in the pop culture landscape.

One of the reasons I count myself among the luckiest people on earth is that I got to meet all of these people, and even spend some time with them.  I thought I would share some thoughts and memories.

Buddy Hackett got the least amount of coverage when he died in June, the result, I suspect, of youthful decision-makers in various media.  (Some of the obits were astonishing in their

Buddy Hackett with Spike Jones and Hugh O'Brian in Fireman, Save My Child (1954). The studio had already filmed long-shots and stunt sequences for this proposed Abbott and Costello comedy when the team bowed out of the project. Young contract players Hackett and O'Brian were recruited for the job because their physiques resembled those of the famous team!

ignorance of his career.)  Hackett enjoyed great success in nightclubs, comedy records, television, and on Broadway.  While his movie career was spotty, he still made memorable contributions to such films as The Music Man, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, The Love Bug, and The Little Mermaid, for which he provided the voice of Scuttle the addle-brained seagull. 

He was signed by Universal-International in the early 1950s, and as he once told Johnny Carson, the contract said he couldn’t make films for anyone else.  After a year, he explained, they typed in “...or us either.”

Buddy was nothing if not blunt, and he told me that he’d once been approached by Billy Wilder to appear in one of his movies.  Buddy asked him why his last movie hadn’t been so good, and Wilder said it was just the way things went—some clicked and some didn’t.  Buddy replied, quite seriously, that as a nightclub comic he didn’t understand that answer.  “I’ve never had a night when I wasn’t funny.”  Wilder was offended, but in all probability, Buddy was right; he was one of the most naturally funny men I’ve ever met. 

He also told me that he was approached to replace Curly Howard in the Three Stooges’ act.  (He did appear in a Columbia short, a one-reeler for Columbia called King of the Pins, in 1950.)  He turned down the offer, he said, because he didn’t want to be dependent on two other guys for his future.  He was, first, last and always his own man.

Gregory Peck was an imposing figure, and his leading-man good looks never failed to impress my wife when we encountered him over the years at various events. 

He was not Atticus Finch, as some people wrote upon his death, though of course he loved playing the part. (He was very proud of the fact that the elusive author Harper Lee had sent him a poem in later years, which he happily recited on the spot.)   A thoughtful and intelligent man, he had a gift for self-deprecating humor.

I once asked him about the satisfaction he got from being a producer; after all, he was the one responsible for bringing To Kill a Mockingbird to the screen, not to mention Cape Fear, in which he boldly allowed Robert Mitchum to steal his thunder.

“It is gratifying if it turns out well,” he responded.  “I’ve also chosen some stories that didn’t work, so if it turns out well, it’s an extra kind of gratification.  If it turns out badly, it’s an extra kind of humiliation,” he said with a laugh. “I’ve had it both ways.  I long ago produced  a picture called Pork Chop Hill, taken from a documentary account of the capture of a certain hill in Korea by a company of G.I.s.  A purely documentary account, and we did very little to fictionalize it.  I think it was probably one of the most realistic combat films ever made, and it turned out exactly the way we wanted it to; it was pure, it was clean, there was no cheap sentiment or false patriotism and Mom’s apple pie.  It was the straight goods.  I was very proud of it, and Time magazine chose it was one of the ten best films of the year, but people didn’t knock down the doors of the theater to get in to see it.  So, in a case like that, I had the satisfaction of having produced a fine film, but we did not have the satisfaction of making any money with it.”

I had the pleasure of interviewing Bob Hope a number of times, and discovered early on that he genuinely enjoyed reminiscing, and the more specific a question I asked, the better

NBC hung these banners alongside Riverside Drive in Toluca Lake for Bob Hope's 100th birthday in May. Hope lived about a mile from the network he called home for half a century.

the answer would be.  He was always happy to talk about radio, which served me well when I wrote a book on that subject.  I asked him who did the audience warmup for his show, which was normally the job of the announcer.

“Funny thing,” he recalled.  “I did the warmup [at] first, and I used to do some of my vaudeville act, which was just a little bit off-color.  It was the dumbest thing in the world, because then you had to come out with clean material after doing things that were just a little racy, you know?  And it didn’t play.  I couldn’t figure that out.  Finally somebody said, ‘Your warmup is better than your material!’ ”

I even asked him how he came to live in the community of Toluca Lake.  The answer was simple:  Bing moved there first.  For many years, the Hopes rented a house on the lake from cartoon producer Walter Lantz, but in 1950 he was driving on Moorpark Street and noticed two adjacent lots for sale.  He purchased one immediately, for ten thousand dollars, then regretted that he hadn’t bought the other one; it had been snapped up by two art directors at Universal, who made a quick profit by selling it back to Hope for $40,000.  It was often mistakenly reported that he lived on the lake, although he was just a short distance from the fabled Lakeside golf club.  What his real-estate purchase did permit was the installation of a two-hole course in his own back yard.

One thing that always irritated me was the charge that Hope was dependent on his writers to be funny.  True, no comedian employed as many writers, or accumulated as many gags, as Hope did during his long career.  But he had a gift that went far beyond the actual construction of one-liners or recitation of scripts.  What’s more, no one enjoyed telling jokes as much as he did, on or off-stage.

Meeting Katharine Hepburn was one of the great thrills of my life.  I never dreamed that I would spend time with her in her Manhattan apartment, but I did, on more than one occasion.  She was an interviewer’s dream come true:  forthright, opinionated, colorful, and articulate. 

I asked her if she resented the fact that she had to work so hard to protect her privacy.  “I don’t resent it; I understand it,” she replied.  “I never think about it ‘cause I’ve lived my life that way for so damn long, that I sort of take it for granted.  I was rather startled when a

Katharine Hepburn in a striking photo from the very odd but interesting film Sylvia Scarlett (1935)

gentleman who I thought was going to tow my car away out here on 49^th Street, where they’re very fussy... I went up to him and I said, ‘You can arrest me any time you damn please, but if you touch my car I’ll shoot you.’  And he looked up at me and he said, ‘You’re... aren’t you?’ and I said yes, and he threw his arms around me and gave me a great big kiss!”

The word “self-deprecating” comes to mind again, and while much has been written about Miss Hepburn’s imperiousness, especially in later years, I found her to be quite brutal in her assessment of herself.  When I asked her why she never accepted her Academy Awards in person—even the very first one, at the 1934 ceremony—she said, “Oh, it was me being my impossible self, probably.”  She also explained that when she won the Oscar for Morning Glory she thought she actually deserved it for Little Women, which was made the same year.  The approach to her character of Eva Lovelace in Morning Glory “I stole from Ruth Gordon, so I really can’t claim that that was my brilliant notion...  I think Little Women was really a remarkable performance.  I look at it and I think, ‘Oh my dear, you were very good!  And well cast.’ ” 

Finally, I will never forget listening to Buddy Ebsen make a presentation at the Golden Boot Awards in 1984.  Buddy was chosen to present the Boot to western star Rex Allen, and told the following story:  he had been hired to work as Rex’s sidekick in a series of B westerns for Republic Pictures in the early 1950s.  He and Rex got along well, and it was a good job. 

Then, one night, Republic chieftain Herbert Yates went to a nightclub and saw Pinky Lee

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perform.  The next morning he told Ebsen he was being fired because “you’re not as funny as Pinky Lee.”

Telling this story, more than thirty years later, after the enormous  success of The Beverly Hillbillies and Barnaby Jones, Ebsen explained that he had just been hired to costar in yet another television series that fall, joining Lee Horsley in Matt Houston.

“And now, every night, before I go to bed,” Ebsen said, “I pray, ‘Please... don’t let Aaron Spelling see Pinky Lee!”

I’ve had a warm place in my heart for Buddy Ebsen ever since that night.