Chapter 22
One thing I hate is downtime. I get fidgety and cranky when I’m not working. It goes against that work ethic my parents instilled in me.
During the ten-year period when I was making pictures, there were lulls—and I hated them. Whenever I had a little free time, and whenever there was a good project, I’d return to TV. From 1951 to 1961 I did a bunch of things, mostly anthology shows, which have since gone the way of the dinosaur—The Ford Television Theatre, Fireside Theatre, The O. Henry Playhouse, Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, and The Zane Grey Theater. The ones that spelled theater “theatre” were a little snootier. Unlike a lot of actors, I had no compunction about jumping from one medium to the other. I didn’t feel television was a comedown. Hell, more people saw me on one of those shows in a single night than saw any one of my movies during its entire run.
So in late 1961 when Universal asked me if I’d do an hour drama, Seven Against the Sea, I said, “Sure.” It was a pilot for a possible series—meaning that if it was good it would be picked up for a year’s worth of episodes. There was going to be an ensemble cast—well, seven—which meant that if it became a weekly show and I had to go off and make a movie, I could. If the pilot was bad, they’d air it once in the small hours of the night just to recoup some of the costs. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out too well. It was telecast on April 3, 1962, on Alcoa Premiere, and that was that.
Jennings Lang, a former agent and now a producer at Universal, saw it and had an idea. Now, not all of Jennings’s ideas were good. For instance, there was the time in 1951 when he supposedly had an affair with actress Joan Bennett. Joan’s husband, producer Walter Wanger, found out about it and shot Jennings right in the crotch.
But this idea happened to be good. Lang said to the suits at Universal, “Why don’t we turn this thing around? We’ve got the boat, we’ve got the lake at the studio. Why don’t we take this same basic concept, turn it around, and make it a comedy?”
That’s how McHale’s Navy was born. I played the Commander of a PT Boat in the South Pacific during World War II.
People assume that because I was in the navy during World War II, the show must’ve been my idea. I wish it was. I’d be making a lot more trips to the bank. See, I don’t get any royalties—back then, the rules said they stopped after seven reruns—but the creators still do. I was just a working stiff.
Edd Henry, a bigwig at Universal, was the one who called me and made the offer for me to star.
At first, I was kind of cool to the idea. Not that it was a bad idea. Phil Silvers had done okay for himself playing Sgt. Bilko on TV. McHale’s Navy was in many ways a knockoff of Bilko, which had been a huge hit. But I had other considerations.
I said, “You know, a commitment like that would really limit the amount of time I have to make movies.”
He said, “True. But you’d make more money if the show is a hit and there are toys with your face on them. Then you’d be even more valuable to a movie producer.”
He had a point. I told him I’d think about it
As I said, I hate being idle—which I happened to be, at the moment. Living in Mexico with Katy had kept me off the Hollywood radar, so we had moved back to Los Angeles. She was working on TV in a lot of westerns and I was waiting for the phone to ring. I hadn’t made a picture since returning from Italy, almost a year. I should add that after a distinguished film career of nearly twenty years, Katy wasn’t happy to be doing TV. She did see it as a step backward. With her unhappy and me unemployed, getting out of the house seemed like a good idea. Especially since we were living on Mulholland Drive and Universal was a short hop down the hill.
The next morning, as the good Lord would have it, a kid came to the door selling chocolate bars from a school out in the San Fernando Valley.
As I was digging through my pocket for money, the kid said, “Mister, your face looks awfully familiar. What’s your name?”
I kidded him and said, “My name is James Arness.”
The kid frowned. “Naw, he does Gunsmoke.”
I said, “You got me. I’m really Richard Boone.”
He said, “He does Have Gun Will Travel.”
I thought, Son of a gun, this kid knows them all, doesn’t he?
I told him, “My name is Ernest Borgnine.”
That got no response. Absolutely nothing!
He said, “I know I’ve seen you somewhere.”
“I won an Academy Award for Marty,” I told him.
“Anything else?” he asked.
I said, “Yeah—buncha things you may have seen. Probably on TV.”
I paid for the chocolate bars, put them on the table, went to the telephone, picked it up.
“Edd,” I said, “that part still open?”
He said, “Yeah.”
I said, “Good. I’ll do it.”
He said, “What changed your mind?”
I said, “Richard Boone,” and let it go at that.
The next year, after the first season of McHale’s Navy—which was a smash beyond all our expectations—I found myself up in Oregon somewhere looking for a place to stay for the night. Katy and I had separated and I was looking for a place to hide from her—and her divorce lawyers. I poked my head into this cabin and the guy looked at me and said, “McHale! What are you doing here?”
Thank God for that kid and his chocolate bars.
I have to admit, I had a lot of fun that first season. I felt really kind of decadent getting up at a reasonable hour each day, driving three miles to the lot, spending my free time in a real dressing room with a real telephone to conduct business, shooting till dinnertime, then going home. It sure beat getting up before dawn to drive to Lonesome Pine, freezing my ass off, and waiting around to say a line or two and get punched.
Plus, there was something in the air at the time. TV was becoming big business. Up till now, a lot of shows had been made by independent producers who had been making low-budget movies in the 1940s and 1950s and just moved their crews and talent into low-budget TV. Universal was one of the first studios to see that there was a fortune to be made in this new medium, and the studio was just starting to make that transition.
By the time McHale ended its run, we’d be doing the episodes in color. Color TV really caused the medium to grow. In fact, it was during this time that Universal built the infamous “black tower” on the back lot. That’s the office building on Lankershim Boulevard—since dwarfed by an even larger black tower. The scuttlebutt on the lot was that the accountants were moving in and taking over, and that proved to be the case. The actors didn’t feel it, but the producers did. They could no longer call someone like a Louis B. Mayer or a Darryl F. Zanuck or a Walt Disney and say, “Chief, I need another two weeks and an extra million bucks to finish this picture” and get a yea or nay that day. Now it had to go to a committee and, more often than not, you were turned down.
Also, during our four years on the air, Universal started conducting studio tours. The back lot was always abuzz with activity and the smiling faces of fans as the trams came through. Back then, the tour actually visited working sets like ours. In fact, the studio hired one of my costars, Bob Hastings, to meet and greet the fans. It was a real thrill for them, and for him. We used to pop out of the bushes with spears in our hands and scare the tourists. That was fun for us, till one day a big old fat lady fell out of the tram. The front office said, “No more attacking the tourists!”
I have to admit, one thing I never expected was the joy of working day after day with a brilliant ensemble. Tim Conway is a comic genius and in no small way one of the reasons McHale’s Navy was so successful. He was always ad-libbing and coming up with comic bits that kept the show fresh and the cast on our toes. You had to be sharp to act with him. Gavin MacLeod is also a great talent who went on to great fame on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, where he was a standout, and later as the captain of The Love Boat. Joe Flynn, a lovely guy and TV veteran, brought a lot to the show as well. I was shocked when he died a few years after we went off the air, drowning when he suffered a heart attack while swimming. He was just forty-nine. Then there was Bob Hastings, whose brother Don I mentioned earlier, having worked with him in New York in the fifties. Bob also popped up in a film I did, The Poseidon Adventure, where he played the emcee counting down the new year as a big wave raced toward the ship.
We had a great time on McHale’s Navy. We got to know each other and the routine so well, in fact, that one time we could have finished an episode in a day and a half instead of three days. I said, “No, let’s come back and finish tomorrow. Otherwise, Universal will have us shooting each show in a day and a quarter!”
The people behind the camera loved working on our show because we had so many laughs. Crews would fight to be assigned to us. Let me tell you, that never happened on any feature film I ever worked on before or since!
There’s a tradition, after the first season, for the stars to buy something for the cast and crew. So I got everyone personalized red, white, and blue sweaters with McHALE’S NAVY written on the back. Everybody went nuts and started wearing them around the studio. One day, Lew Wasserman, the head of the studio, came up and said, “All right, where’s mine?” So I had to run around like crazy and try to get one, then had one of the wardrobe gals sew “Lew” on it. I never saw the son of a gun wear it, but he had one.
The only unpleasant memory of the show was when our producer, Edward Montagne, would come down to see the dailies, the raw footage shot the day before. He got the job because he’d been a supervising producer on the Bilko show. For the first part of the first season, I’d ask Ed what he thought. He’d grumble and not really answer. One of the writers, a sweetheart named Si Rose, would watch the same dailies and when I asked him he’d always say, “Great—you guys are doing a hell of a job.” That was important, because we hadn’t gone on the air yet and had no idea how people would react. All actors need feedback, and producers should be willing to give it. Usually, they do. In fact, it’s tough to keep them from interfering.
So one day I approached this producer. I said, “Why don’t you come down to the set once in a while and tell the guys they’re doing a good job? It’d mean a lot to ’em and they do work hard.”
He looked at me like he’d swallowed a bug. “I don’t kiss anybody’s ass,” he said.
I said, “Hey, I’m not asking you to kiss any ass. Just pat ’em on the back a little.”
He said, “Insecure actors. Jesus,” and walked away.
Well, I grabbed him to turn him back around and we really got into it. I ripped his shirt and he ripped mine. We almost came to blows. Luckily we didn’t. This producer directed us a few times, at the very beginning. It was a disaster, because this guy didn’t know how to direct his way out of a toilet. We’d finally work it out on our own, when he was busy doing something else, and he’d say “Okay, let’s do it that way.” As if he’d thought of it!
McHale’s Navy ran four seasons. It could have gone on a lot longer, but the producer insisted that we move the crew of PT 73 from the fictional Pacific island of Taratupa to Italy in order to give us fresh storylines. You know, that kind of move is always a disaster, like marrying two characters like Jeannie and Col. Nelson or Lois and Clark. Introduce new characters, send ’em to Italy or Hawaii or wherever for a two-parter, but don’t fix what ain’t broken! Fans didn’t like the new approach and we were canceled a lot sooner than we should have been. Still, we made 148 episodes and had a great time with every one of them. As I write this, early in 2008, I still get letters from people who grew up with the show and—believe it or not—forty years later Tim Conway and I still work together, doing voices on the kids’ Saturday cartoon show, SpongeBob SquarePants! I bitch from time to time, but this can be a great business. How many people do you know who are still working with old colleagues after so many years?
It’s kind of funny, though. I’m still working with Tim after four decades. But when it comes to women…