Crane (12 page)

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 most prestigious role of his career—playing the Cary Grant role in an ABC television production of
Arsenic and Old Lace.
He worked with Helen Hayes, Lillian Gish, David Wayne, and Fred Gwynne. The play was videotaped in front of a live audience in New York. It would be my dad’s only project outside of
Hogan’s
that had a distinctive level of quality. It also challenged my dad’s acting chops. He did a respectable job, but Cary Grant didn’t need to come out of retirement to defend his crown. Besides, no one watched the broadcast.

In 1969, what had been our little Tarzana family series was suddenly canceled. Life as my parents, sisters, grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles knew it was not being renewed for another season. Dad would never live in our house again. My parents, those rocks of stability, always to be counted on, taken for granted even, just crumbled overnight. Mom and Dad. Together since high school. Married for twenty years. The pioneers who had traveled west in their Oldsmobile Conestoga, braving the
dangers of midwestern food and sleeping rough in Travelodges and Holiday Inns, would never spend another night together. I was seventeen, my sisters eight and nine.

The change came like a tsunami—a warm, comfortable atmosphere one moment, and then in an instant I was underwater, looking for something to keep me afloat. Everything I knew, trusted, and counted on was drowned. Overnight Mom officially became a single parent. Dad was officially gone. Gone with another woman. As blame, anger, mistrust, and confusion permeated the household, I looked at my dad differently from that moment on.

Young people don’t like change; they rely on continuity. Still comfortably naïve, I was trying desperately to hold onto something that wasn’t there anymore. We had just had our small world rocked by an 8.2 earthquake, and there was no way to prep for the ensuing surge when you didn’t know what was coming. It was everyone for himself; just try to keep your head above the rising tide.

I thought what might help me stay afloat was a girlfriend. There with
lifesaving water wings was a chipper, freckle-faced redhead who loved politics named Chris Klauser. She and I dutifully played our roles as boyfriend and girlfriend, going to school dances, skiing with her family, making out in my ’66 Ford Mustang, which Chris dubbed the White Horse. We would break up, get back together, and ultimately attend the senior prom arm in arm. These were all anxiety-producing, seemingly important moments. In the end, like most high school romances, our relationship wasn’t sustainable. There wasn’t enough life experience for it to feed off. There’s only so long that teenaged hormones can keep a thing alive, but this first serious relationship did serve as a rite of passage, a necessary road for me to take and invaluable life experience in the mysteries of bra hardware.

At the same time I was having profound conversations with Chris about Vietnam, civil rights, and international justice, I found I could also have a pleasant time with a nonpolitical girl named Pam Connell, who had long, dark hair and was two years younger than I, in the tenth grade when I was a senior. We met in photography class. Pam came from a broken home, which I could immediately relate to. She was living with her mother; her dad was gone. She liked Creedence Clearwater Revival. In a lot of ways I could connect with her much more easily than with Chris, who came from a highly educated family stocked with teachers, professors, and principals. In the Klauser household there was always talk of PhDs, theses, and graduate schools, all things that my family had never experienced. Ultimately, I felt I didn’t fit in with that family. The Cranes were a circus troupe, a carny family compared to the Klausers. We were freaks. Besides, Pam Connell’s bra was a snap to unhook.

The impact on my life of my folks’ separation was truly the shattering of a dream. They had always seemed so safe, so certain. Perhaps they had thought so themselves, complacent that they could weather any storm. Hell, they had moved across the country. They had taken creative leaps. They were conservative by nature, politically and in terms of family values. There were no drugs; there was no alcohol. There was no pill-popping craziness, schizophrenia, suicide attempts, physical or mental abuse. We were a small-thinking, small-town family living in a suburban community with a dad who just happened to be on radio and television. However, by the time of the separation and divorce, my dad was a very well-known television star. That fact alone fueled the announcement of the breakup, which begat a raft of rumors and innuendoes: Bob cheated on Anne at
work, Anne cheated with her physician on Bob. It was another showbiz family run amok. Former working-class nobodies wrecked by money and fame.

I hated the expressions on the faces of my classmates when I entered a classroom or walked down a hallway. Some were sympathetic, some were smug and smirking, and some were embarrassed for me. I hated the whispers. “That’s Hogan’s son.” I didn’t want to be Hogan’s son. I cringed at having the same name. I went by Robert Crane to lessen the blowback of Bob Crane. Still, many well-meaning people called me Bob Crane Junior. I would smile and quietly respond, “I’m not a junior; we have different middle names.” The well-meaning people didn’t care. I wasn’t an individual to them. I rose or fell depending on how strangers felt about my dad. I’ve never been comfortable with that. I didn’t enjoy rooms going quiet when I walked in. I didn’t want to be the center of attention.

It all became a moot point when I graduated from Taft High School in June 1969 along with a thousand other boomer teenagers. My mom attended the marathon ceremony. My dad did not.

One of my chief motivating factors for going on to college was the simple fact that I wanted to survive past eighteen years of age. Going to college meant a 2-S student deferment from the draft, which equated to not having to draw my last breaths in a Vietnamese rice paddy because that country’s people didn’t embrace our square peg brand of capitalism and democracy in their round hole. I didn’t buy the sleight-of-hand McCarthyesque leftovers being sold by the war industry in Washington, DC, that proclaimed we had to stop the hammer and sickle before it came ashore in Long Beach.

Ours was a nonacademic family. There weren’t any parchment degrees and Phi Beta Kappa certificates decorating the walls next to the eight-by-ten glossies at our house. Success in show business didn’t require attending great houses of learning or acquiring a string of initials after your name. Still, with the monolithic demon of Vietnam looming over me, I talked to my dad about possibly going to the University of Southern California. USC had a world-class film school, and I wanted to be a filmmaker.

The height of American film—and world film, as far as I’m concerned—occurred during the ’60s and ’70s. Eagerly anticipated reviews from Charles Champlin and Kevin Thomas in the
L.A. Times
would kick-start
boisterous conversations with friends about which film or films to see on the coming Friday and Saturday nights. We would drive over to Westwood and stand in line for an hour or more to get in to see
Easy Rider, Medium Cool, Midnight Cowboy,
or
The Wild Bunch.
Foreign films were at their height of popularity. I knew all the directors: Bergman, Visconti, Truffaut, Antonioni, Fellini. I looked forward to each month’s issue of
Cinema
magazine. It was a very exciting time. Looking back now, I know that was partly because of my age and the fact that I was fresh and impressionable, but also it was an era of truly envelope-pushing filmmaking going on right before our eyes. Cassavetes, Costa-Gavras, Schlesinger, Penn, and Russell were just a few of the directors who were making thought-provoking movies. Film was art, and since I couldn’t paint, draw, or sculpt, I wanted to go to film school.

In the late ’60s there were three choices for film school: NYU, UCLA, and USC. My dad had emceed a few dinners for USC in previous years and happened to know the dean of the cinema school, Bernie Kantor. A phone call was made; I met with Dr. Kantor, filled out an application, and soon thereafter was accepted into the university even with my unexceptional 3.0 grade point average. It was like the Beatles tickets redux. Would I have been accepted at USC without my dad’s phone call? I don’t know, but since no one in my family had ever attended college, I felt proud of my pioneering soul.

13

On the morning of July 1, I woke with a start. In an instantaneous and regrettable flood of consciousness I realized my dad was still dead and there was a stranger in the next room.

It turned out that the guard hired by my stepmother, Patti, was there because she was paranoid I might clear out the apartment. While there was a lot of equipment there that now technically belonged to her, that wasn’t what she was really worried about. Patti was afraid that I would get my hands on video footage and photos that revealed her in some very compromising positions, and the singular fiction she’d been presenting to the court—that my dad was pursuing a life of porn and yet was on the verge of a reconciliation with her—would go up in the toxic fumes of so much unpreserved nitrate film stock. I had seen evidence that proved Patti had a lot to be paranoid about. My dad had shown me photos of Patti and him with a woman they had met at a nightclub engaged in a threesome in the bedroom of their house on Tilden Avenue. The bedroom next to the one where their young son slept. The son Patti was trying to leverage to her advantage when talking to the judge and media jury.

I had tried not to look at the photographs initially, but it was like the irresistible pull you feel passing a car wreck on the highway—my voyeurism got the better of me. It was a looky-lulu moment. How many people ever see their parents or stepparents in carnal bliss? How many want to? Not many would be my guess. I didn’t have friends who had seen their stepmother nude, let alone having sex with another woman. Hell, I didn’t have any friends who even had a stepmother in the first place. Yet my dad proudly shared these shocking images with me as if he were hawking wares on a card table in Times Square. He behaved like a jock at a fraternity party, oblivious to my uncomfortable reaction. I felt like a cult member witnessing events that would sicken the average person. Nevertheless, I didn’t allow in ill feelings because of my belief that life is about processing
information to decipher the truth. I felt that recording people and events in my mind’s eye always took precedence.

Patti knew my dad had these photos and plenty of other material that ballyhooed her talents as the star of the Midvale Avenue film production center located on our dining room table. She didn’t know the extent of my knowledge of her exploits, but she was keenly aware she had to secure the loose nukes that had her empire written on the nosecone. Not that launching her private images would have impacted her inheritance, which was hers alone, but it certainly would have pockmarked the public image she had concocted for the press, the courts, and her son. She was terrified I would back up a moving van to the apartment, sweep everything into it, and disappear, leaving the key in the door with a note reading, “See you in the
Enquirer.
”

The poor schmuck of a guard didn’t look like he had gotten much sleep either, and he clearly had no clue why he was in the apartment to begin with since I had returned home. I felt sorry for him. We both made some phone calls, and a short time later he received his marching orders.

Now I was really alone. The seriousness of that aloneness closed around me like the darkness in a theater just before the movie starts. I was in a ghastly horror film, and I already knew the blood-spattered ending. There was no hero coming to save the day, no last-minute intervention by the governor, no swelling of music as the sun slid into a calming ocean. There were only tears. Lots of tears.

At some point on that afternoon of July 1 Patti showed up at the apartment. It was not a condolence call. She offered nothing in the way of sympathy to a son who had just lost his father. She was on a mission. It was a reconnaissance, much like the one I imagine she had done in Scottsdale. She was reconnoitering, mentally inventorying the apartment and its contents. Maybe I was next on her hit list. This was the first time I’d seen or spoken to her since the murder. She was steely, dry-eyed, and cold as a concrete slab. She was not the grieving widow for her prodigal but supposedly reconciling husband. She walked quickly through the apartment, surveying, ticking items off in her head. She knew what she was looking for.

I asked her, innocently enough, “Why did this have to happen?”

“Well,” she said as she panned the dining room media center, “I guess your father’s lifestyle caught up with him.” That was it. One last look around and she was out the door.