Crane (13 page)

I felt as though I were standing naked in the snow. The apartment was a frozen, lifeless place. My dad was no longer part of it. I resolved to move out, pronto. Even if I could have afforded the rent on my own, I would have had to move. All that equipment, the cameras and monitors, the tape decks, editing machine, the wires and cables, had all become just so much steel and plastic. It didn’t mean anything without my dad laughing and whistling as he spliced tape together or dubbed in music, entertaining himself with his own ingenuity.

When I did move out, I took a few items that my dad had said were mine. These included a three-quarter-inch videocassette player, a video monitor, and a tape recorder. But I did not take any of his video or photographic archive. I wanted to live to see my twenty-eighth birthday.

I’ve never been very attached to material possessions because things in and of themselves don’t mean much to me without the person they belong to. Clothing, shoes, jewelry, photographs, or other keepsakes just don’t resonate unless the person connected to them is still around, not necessarily in the vicinity but still walking the planet somewhere, sharing the air. Otherwise, all that stuff is clutter—dead, inanimate dust collectors. I keep people I love alive in my heart and my mind. I don’t need a threadbare sweater or a one-eyed teddy bear to remind me of someone important to me. Besides, I hate dusting.

Even so, I did keep my dad’s leather jacket from
Hogan’s Heroes,
but I cherished it not just because it was my dad’s but also because it was worn by Frank Sinatra in the 1965 film
Von Ryan’s Express.
For me, the jacket was as much a piece of cinema memorabilia as it was a family memento. Like a UN peacekeeper I gave Hogan’s hat to Patti because she said Scotty always loved seeing his dad in it. Odd, since Scotty wasn’t even born until after
Hogan’s Heroes
’ six seasons were over.

I pulled up in front of my mom and Chuck’s house in my four-year-old orange BMW 2002. The usually quiet cul-de-sac was full of cars. I watched as people who had never been to the house before and would never be there again went in the front door. The scene had the appearance of the beginnings of a summer barbeque, albeit without any joviality. I joined the queue. Once inside I immediately spied the father of a friend of mine and some of Chuck’s family members, the Worthingtons, making their debut at the house. After my initial question “What are they doing here?” I realized they meant their presence to be consoling, but then I
cynically thought, “Were they expecting to see Hollywood stars on the patio overlooking the Valley?”

Entertaining the guests superseded the opportunity to sit down with my mother, sisters, grandmothers, and Chuck to talk about “it”—to cry, hug each other, utter useless platitudes, and rally each other’s broken hearts. We were in the middle of a wake—drinks were poured, beers were opened, heads shaking all the while in disbelief. Most of the drop-ins had never met my dad, but they “knew” him.

Afternoon rolled ever so slowly into night, and my family never had that sit-down meeting, that cry fest, that hug-in. Stealing moments, we would catch one another’s eye and try to express smatterings of anger, disappointment, embarrassment, what-ifs, and whys. We exchanged comments that were fragments of feelings but never coalesced into a complete picture. It wasn’t just the presence of the outsiders. We were not a cohesive unit. We were not the mythical family that I had always fantasized we should be. The family that stands together, finding solace in tragedy.

In any event, I didn’t need to cry anymore. I’d done enough of that for now, and I knew there’d be more tears down the road. I also had no need for the hugs and handshakes, the concerned looks from neighbors and parents of friends. They offered up their quasi-religious airy statements meant as comfort, but these rapidly turned mind numbing. What I needed was a dialogue with my immediate family, an acknowledgment between us that some kind of otherworldly, unthinkable abnormality had happened to us. What I needed was for us to develop a mutual plan of attack on how to deal with the emotional fallout. That meeting has never to this day taken place.

On Wednesday, July 5, my dad was remembered by 150 people at St. Paul the Apostle Church in Westwood and buried at the Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth (where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers rest in peace). Carroll O’Connor, Patty Duke and John Astin, Robert Clary, Larry Hovis, Leon Askin, and Edward H. Feldman were among the attendees. Patti and Scotty avoided my side of the family, but John Carpenter did not. He gave me a warm embrace on the steps leading to the church. Thinking about it now makes me shudder.

Carpenter was always on the top of the Scottsdale Police Department’s suspect list. As far as I was concerned, the more I learned about the events of June 28 and 29, 1978, the more the anomalies of this particular trip Carpenter took to see my dad stood out. Carpenter always stayed with my
dad on the road. This time he didn’t. Carpenter never called me when he got back from seeing my dad. This time he did. The call itself was innocuous, but the fact that he made it in the first place was bizarre to me.

Eyewitnesses at a nightclub had reported my dad and Carpenter in a heated argument the night of the 28th. There was a video camera tripod missing from the murder scene that the police suspected might be the murder weapon. A section of electrical cord used with the camera had been tied around my dad’s neck, although, per the coroner, it was not the cause of death. Recently, my dad had told me that Carpenter was becoming “a pain in the ass,” and as part of his changes he was going to end his relationship with him. The police figured that Carpenter, who was bisexual, was perhaps in love with my dad and reacted to this information like a spurned lover.

I also learned that Carpenter had called my dad’s apartment and the dinner theater on the 29th from L.A., returning to the scene of the crime, albeit by phone, in the opinion of the Scottsdale police. All of these incidences didn’t add up to a conviction of Carpenter, but they certainly gave me pause. Maybe Carpenter was guilty.

It also wasn’t out of the realm of possibility in my mind that Patti and
Carpenter were somehow in cahoots—either she had directly put him up to the job or, in a more Machiavellian manipulation of the volatile Carpenter, had stoked him into his own rage. Either way, the result suited her just fine.

The chance that I was ever going to talk to Patti again without lawyers present was virtually nil, but when Carpenter phoned me again over the next couple of weeks I would secretly tape-record those two telephone conversations, though I later inadvertently taped over the first call. I didn’t know what I might learn from his calls, but I wanted a record of them nonetheless. The second chat was the last time I would ever have a substantial dialogue with Carpenter, but at least I didn’t bungle that taping.*

Weeks after that last recording, I called the AKAI Corporation where Carpenter worked but was unable to get him on the line. He never returned my call, possibly because he had lawyered up by then. The Scottsdale Police Department had leaked Carpenter’s name as prime suspect to the press. Carpenter hired Gary Fleischman as his attorney, and they publicly expressed “shock” that Carpenter, Bob Crane’s buddy, was even mentioned as a person of interest in the case. Maricopa County district attorney Charles Hyder refused to file charges against Carpenter, citing the less than airtight investigation the Scottsdale Police Department had conducted. “I’m very perturbed about it,” Hyder told the
Arizona Republic.
“It’s not my policy at all to mention anybody’s name until we arrest them or they have been indicted. … Certainly not during an investigation. … As of right now, I’m sorry to say, there is just insufficient evidence for us to take any action on, I wish it were otherwise.”

I decamped from the apartment to my mom and Chuck’s house, bivouacking there until I could get my bearings.

*See
appendix B
for the transcript of that call.

14

The summer of love for the graduates of Taft High School in Woodland Hills was 1969, even though the official Summer of Love was the summer of 1967. That was the year of Haight-Ashbury, Griffith Park love-ins, and the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love.” I was still too young, too naïve, and too inexperienced in 1967 to appreciate what that season meant. The highlight of my summer of love in 1969 was our all-night grad party held for L.A. high schools at Disneyland. My girlfriend, Chris Klauser, my friend Chris Fryer, and his date, Sandee Ericsson, and I cut out early from the Disneyland festivities and retreated to a small adobe hideaway that Klauser’s family owned in the northern foothills of the San Fernando Valley. We brought food, built a fire in the big stone fireplace, and the four of us spent the night there. I celebrated my graduation by finally getting Chris’s damn bra off. Talk about winning a scholarship.

In an eerie footnote to that memorable evening, it just so happened that the Manson family, which we would all hear about later that summer, was not far away from our location at the adobe. Charlie Manson and his clan were living farther up in the hills on an abandoned movie set that had been used in a lot of old-time westerns, such as the Tom Mix movies of the ’20s. Manson and his deluded minions were plotting the bloodletting they would perpetrate that August less than a mile from the love nest where the four of us were studying anatomy in our sleeping bags.

On June 27, 1969, I turned eighteen. In a few weeks the dreaded draft lottery for the Vietnam War was to be held. With the war escalating badly, the lottery became a perverse television event. I watched it at home, which by that summer was solely my mom’s house, as my parents had separated. The lottery worked by drawing numbers that matched birth dates. There was a big hopper with 366 ping-pong balls, like a Powerball drawing on steroids, except instead of winning a fortune you could win your future. It was a drawing for the rest of your life.

The June 27 ping-pong ball emerged at number 55. That meant two things. The number was, first of all, a guarantee of being drafted. Before the year was out, the military would call numbers 1 through 195 in an attempt to stem the Red tide flowing down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. My immediate reaction when the June 27 ball popped up was a vision of me, scared shitless in the monsoon rain in a Southeast Asian jungle. My body would come home in a box a few weeks later. So, the second and more important meaning of that number 55 ping-pong ball was that I would be the first Crane to go to college. If you stayed in school, you stayed out of Vietnam.

Just when I needed an infusion of character- and confidence-building in my life (and a shorthand education in the world of business, marketing, and selling), in that summer of 1969 between high school and college, Chris Fryer and I created a company called FC Enterprises that designed and manufactured license plate frames for colleges and universities. It was an idea we hatched one summer afternoon on our way home from Zuma Beach. The business model was simple: As an alternative to putting “Fletcher Jones Chevrolet” license plate frames on your car, we would offer USC Trojans frames painted in cardinal and gold. The die-cast frames would have the college’s nickname on top, and the school’s name would be bookended by its logo on the bottom.

Chris’s dad, David, was instrumental in the development of our fledgling enterprise. Dave Fryer’s world was retail—furniture, bedding, appliances. Chris and I were proud and excited about our new business. We invited our dads to a lunch meeting, the only time they ever met, at Monty’s Steakhouse in Encino to show off our creation and bask in their appreciation of our entrepreneurial spirit and our potential mint. Chris’s dad enthusiastically offered advice on building professional relationships; selling, marketing, and advertising the product; and using positive public relations to build the business into something sustainable. My dad listened but had nothing to offer. I was disappointed and a bit embarrassed as I ate my steak sandwich, but later it dawned on me that the only product my dad specialized in was himself. That’s all he knew. He didn’t have a marketing strategy or ideas for advertising in publications or methods for cold-calling a list of potential customers. He could shake someone’s hand, smile, and make a joke. He could stand in front of an audience and talk into a microphone. But he couldn’t offer us any business acumen for an inanimate product. That made a big impression on me. His dad, my
grandfather, Alfred Crane, would have been more help to us at that meeting because he came from the world of furniture and carpeting and might have supplemented Dave Fryer’s ideas. But I was happy, at least, that my dad attended the lunch meeting and listened.

FC Enterprises went on to become something like a dot-com success decades before there were such things. Since our first two accounts were USC and UCLA, it wasn’t long before we were spotting our product on a daily basis on the rear end of vehicles speeding along the byways of Los Angeles. Every time I saw the frames on a car, I felt much like what I imagine songwriters feel hearing a song they’ve written coming out of their dashboard radio. Through direct mail advertising, phone calls, and driving around the country, Chris and I managed to recruit over a hundred colleges and universities to sell school-spirited license plate frames. We expanded the business into service and fraternal groups like the American Legion and the Elks clubs, and ultimately to all the major league sports franchises. So from nothing but a crazy kernel of an idea on the way home from a day at the beach, we nurtured and tended our business into something of a national garden of green. It sure beat flipping burgers.