COULDA, WOULDA, SHOULDA

I don’t harbor many regrets in my life; I’ve been fortunate to meet people and have experiences that others might only dream about. But there are a few things I could and should have done better.

One is to avoid procrastination. I’ve delayed calling people I wanted to interview because I had no particular deadline…and waited too long. This thought popped into my head last week as I was watching a rerun of an episode of Wanted: Dead or Alive with Steve McQueen on the Encore Westerns channel. In the supporting cast were Lori Nelson, Michael Pate, and Than Wyenn, a busy and versatile actor who seems to have worked nonstop in the  heyday of episodic television. I met Than some years ago at High Holy Day services at our place of worship, The Beverly Hills Synagogue for the Arts, which meets at the Saban Theatre (formerly the Fox Wilshire on Wilshire Boulevard.)

So why didn’t I take Than aside and ask him for an interview? Because I was dumb! We all put things off, I suppose, but when one is dealing with an elderly person one can’t and shouldn’t postpone a meeting like that. I did speak to him on the phone some years after first meeting him. I was wondering if he was well enough to appear on camera to talk about his recurring role on Walt Disney’s Zorro. From the weakness of his voice I could tell that the answer was no, but he shared a lovely memory: during a lunch break on the set one day, an oversized, hand-tooled leather director’s chair was unveiled as a crew gift to the show’s corpulent costar Henry Calvin, who played Sergeant Garcia. He was touched, and so was Than in recounting that memory. How much more could I have learned from his experiences with everyone from Jack Webb (who always called on him) to Gene Roddenberry and Aaron Spelling? He died in 2015 at the age of 95. 

I am sorry that I didn’t know such seemingly reclusive stars as Marlene Dietrich and Joan Fontaine engaged in regular correspondence with loyal fans. I started writing to people I admired when I was 11 years old but never thought of reaching out to such “distant” stars—Dietrich in Paris, Fontaine in Northern California. I do have a charming note from the great Claude Rains. I read that he was forced to drop out of a Broadway-bound show and was recovering at his farm in New Hampshire and took a chance on writing a combination get-well and fan letter with only the New Hampshire town as an address and this was the response, which I treasure.

Another regret is not having a camera with me when I was getting started doing interviews in the 1960s. I found the cartoonist and would-be inventor Rube Goldberg in the massive Manhattan telephone book. I called his number and told him I was an admirer and wanted to write about him in my fanzine, Profile. He invited me to visit him in his studio on the chic East Side, and that’s where I saw his current preoccupation: large, kinetic sculptures of the oddly-jointed characters he so often portrayed in pen-and-ink. He worked in clay and then had the finished pieces bronzed. They were sensational, as I recall. I had him sign my copy of his latest book, How to Remove the Cotton from a Bottle Of Aspirin, and Other Problems Solved. But now I can’t find that book and my time with the immortal Mr. Goldberg is just a distant memory.

My then-partner in publishing was a classmate named Barry Gottlieb. He and I got to spend a whole day at the headquarters of Mad Magazine one fine day in 1964. Editor Al Feldstein and his colleagues couldn’t have been more generous with their time and made us feel very grown-up—like reporters on assignment. We left the offices after a lengthy visit with a bottle of Moxie, the obscure (even then) soft drink that was associated with Mad. I had it on display in the basement of the house where I grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey. What wouldn’t I give to showcase it in a place of honor today?

I will admit to a bad habit I was able to break a long time ago. When I was a teenager I adopted some of the money-saving habits that my father, a Depression-era survivor, regarded as routine. About fifteen years ago I decided to transfer all my early audiocassette interviews to a hard-drive, to protect them and make it easier to access them. It was then that I faced the unavoidable fact that I regularly re-used those cassettes and recorded over the conversations I had already transcribed! The evidence is there on the labels, where I have crossed out the name of the first interviewee and written in the newer person. I won’t embarrass myself further by telling you some of the people I erased. I wasn’t thinking about posterity so much as saving three dollars on a blank cassette. We can’t undo the past—we can only learn from it. Thank goodness I learned that lesson by the early 1970s.