Hello Darlin' (19 page)

A
t the start of the fifth season, the network forced Sidney to finally have Jeannie
and Tony get married. Everyone associated with the series knew such a made-for-TV
event would counter the show’s poor ratings, at least in the short term. But as for
Jeannie’
s future, it spelled the end. I knew that if Jeannie and Tony wed, the sexual tension
that kept the show interesting would be gone. All of us waged a bitter fight against
the decision, particularly Sidney and me.

But the wedding episode aired December 2, 1969, amid much publicity and the highest
ratings the show had enjoyed for years. I felt like the groom who walked down the
aisle with a shotgun at his back. When we wrapped the final episode at the end of
January 1970 (the last original show aired May 26) and said good-bye, none of us knew
the show’s fate.

I went straight into a movie-of-the-week for Screen Gems called
Three’s a Crowd.
It costarred Jessica Walter, whom I’d worked with in
The Group,
and E. J. Peaker. It was quick and fun but no earthshaker. Then I took Maj and the
kids on vacation. We spent a week visiting a friend who owned an island in the Caribbean,
and then we surprised
Mother and Richard on the Copacabana in Brazil. Seeming genuinely delighted to see
us, they invited us to the ranch in Anápolis. We went thinking we’d all matured, but
Richard was as miserable as ever.

Upon returning to L.A. at the end of the summer, I drove to Screen Gems to visit Claudio
Guzmán, who was still editing some of
Jeannie’
s last episodes. At the gate, which I’d driven through for five years, the guard told
me that I needed a pass. When I asked why, he informed me that I wasn’t working at
the studio anymore. I made it inside, and then Claudio told me that
Jeannie
had been canceled while I was in Brazil. We didn’t get the trade papers in Brazil
and my agent hadn’t bothered to call me.

I was more relieved than upset.
Jeannie
might’ve run its course creatively, but I’d achieved my goal. From the beginning
I’d wanted to make a memorable comedy, a show that children could watch with their
grandparents, and time has proven
I Dream of Jeannie
one of the best and most enduring sitcoms ever. It’s still on the air every day around
the world.

Meanwhile I had a deal with Screen Gems. I focused on finding a quality script. I
was amazed, disappointed, and ultimately frustrated by how many bad scripts were out
there. I turned down three, but eventually time ran out on my deal and I simply said
to myself, Do the best of the lot and try to make it work.

That turned out to be
The Good Life,
a half-hour sitcom about a husband and wife who abandon their boring middle-class
lives and go to work as a cook and a butler for a wealthy couple without revealing
their lack of experience. Like
Jeannie,
the premise rested on keeping a secret. It also paired me with another gorgeous blond
leading lady, Donna Mills. She’d done a lot of soap operas in New York City but was
a newcomer to Hollywood. I rounded out the cast with my old buddy David Wayne and
Hermione Baddeley, whom I’d known in London. It was a very talented group.

Claudio was the producer and one of the directors. We made sure
the actors had fun, felt creatively involved, and stayed loose with a supply of champagne
that one writer noted was compulsory The set was like an extended family, and on the
weekend my cast mates dropped by the house to add their input to the stories. Sadly,
The Good Life
didn’t last long. NBC put us on opposite
All in the Family,
and we were trounced in the ratings by my good friend Carroll O’Connor.
The Good Life
disappeared after thirteen episodes, and
All in the Family
went on to make history. If you’re going to be shot down, it might as well be by
the best.

*   *   *

Knowing I had free time, Peter Fonda asked me to play a sheriff in
The Hired Hand,
a Western that he was starring in and directing. Peter had assembled a first-rate
cast that included Warren Oates and my friend Severn Darden. There wasn’t a bad card
in the deck. We shot the movie in Santa Fe, and I fell in love with the countryside.
When I got a few days off between scenes, I rented a Plymouth convertible and drove
to Taos to visit Dennis Hopper, who’d been a friend of mine in New York City. We’d
often gone up for the same parts.

He was living in a beautiful old home once owned by Mabel Dodge Luhan. Without exact
directions, I stopped in the main square of Taos and asked around until I found someone
who knew where Dennis lived. An old Indian perched on a wooden rail outside a restaurant
offered to show me if, as he said, I’d “buy an old Indian a glass of wine.”

I needed lunch, so I went in and had a delicious Southwestern-style meal with this
old chap, whose name was Telles Goodmorning. After a couple glasses of wine, he was
absolutely shit-faced, but he still remembered the way to Dennis’s place. I left Telles
Goodmorning asleep in the backseat and went inside.

We drank some wine and tequila, and Dennis showed a cut of a film he’d done in Peru
called
The Last Movie.
I remember he had an
extended scene of himself screwing a beautiful Indian girl underneath a waterfall.
As it went on and on, I got kind of bored and started to say good night, but Dennis
persuaded me to stay at his place instead of driving back to Santa Fe at night.

Then I remembered Telles Goodmorning was still in my car. I went out to take him back
to his pueblo and saw there’d been a passing cloudburst that had dropped a whole lot
of rain in my open car. I found Telles in the backseat with his blanket around him,
sopping wet.

He asked, “Why you leave an old Indian in back of car?”

“I’m really sorry, Telles. I forgot you were out here.”

When I opened the car door about two feet of water gushed out. The Plymouth was trashed
inside. It was only a five-mile drive to Telles Goodmorning’s pueblo. After dropping
him off, I somehow found my way back to Dennis’s and had dinner.

The next thing I remember is waking up at five in the morning with a dreadful hangover
and seeing Telles Goodmorning sitting at the foot of my bed holding a pair of moccasins.
He said his wife had made them. I could tell they were special. The beadwork was spectacular.

“This is for my brother who drove an old Indian home last night,” he said.

In exchange I gave him a whale’s tooth I had on a leather string around my neck. I’d
bought a keg of about three hundred of them for twenty bucks in a New York surplus
store and gave them away as talismans. Telles Goodmorning solemnly touched it to his
forehead, heart, liver, and kidneys, explaining that these were the body’s sacred
points. (Later I’d find out just how sacred the liver was.) Then he solemnly hung
the tooth around his neck, looked up, and smiled.

“We are brothers,” he said. “Maybe you’d buy an old Indian a glass of wine?”

We went into the kitchen and I found him some vodka and orange
juice. I had one myself, of course. A couple of those and he was out of it again.
By midmorning, I deposited him back home in the same condition as I did the night
before. His wife was not too happy with him or me, but she was thankful I’d brought
Telles back home again. Her expression darkened when she looked down at my feet and
saw I was wearing those beautiful moccasins. I feebly gestured my apologies to her.
I knew I was in deep shit and made a speedy exit.

Over the next few days, I shot a couple of scenes and had a few days off. I was thinking
about going back home until I was needed on the set again when Telles Goodmorning
showed up at my hotel. I invited him in. He asked if I knew anything about peyote.
No, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t curious, and I wound up invited to a ceremony later
that night.

I don’t know how I found my way to the designated spot, a small Quonset hut in the
middle of the desert, but somehow I managed. Inside, I met Telles and eight teenage
Indian boys who looked like alkies chasing a new high besides sniffing gasoline. But
I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they were going through their own rite
of passage. I just had to worry about myself.

Telles gave a brief but solemn talk about peyote. Then he gave us each three coffee
cans. One was empty, one was full of water, and one contained peyote buttons. I soon
found out what the empty coffee can was for. It wasn’t long after we chewed the peyote
buttons that we started vomiting into our empty cans and drinking water from the third
can.

After a while, I had no perception of time. The unpleasantness passed and I started
having my dreams. I felt myself sprout wings. Then I saw featherlike hair covering
my legs. And I watched in amazement as my feet turned into hawk’s claws.

Strangely, I wasn’t anxious or frightened by the transformation. In fact, when it
was complete, I took off and flew around the hut. Once I grew accustomed to my wings,
I somehow broke through the walls
and flew above the Quonset hut and up into the mountains. It was spectacular, and
during my flight I was given my song, which I use to calm myself when I’m anxious.

Meanwhile, the Indian boys had a rough go of it. They cried and screamed. The mind
is full of phantasmagoria and demons, and peyote unlocks everything up there. If you
aren’t feeling good about yourself, I can imagine it’d be pretty scary. My head was
in a good space and I enjoyed myself. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so carefree if I’d
known Peter was going to cut me out of the movie. But when it played on television
years later, after
Dallas
had made me famous, the network put me back in.

E
very time I went in front of the camera, I had the same thought: What the heck, it’s
only my career. At forty, I had no illusions about myself. I was an actor, plain and
simple. I wanted to earn a living, get exposure, find good parts. That meant for the
next few years I played a variety of characters, traveled far and wide, and tried
to save a couple bucks from what I got paid. I enjoyed every minute of it.

The 1971 TV movie-of-the-week
A Howling in the Woods
reteamed me with Barbara Eden, and we had a great time working together again. Next
came
Getting Away from It All,
another made-for-TV movie, in Morro Bay, a beautiful spot along the coast south of
San Francisco. Then an opportunity came along to do more than show up and collect
a paycheck. Jack Harris, my next-door neighbor, had produced
The Blob,
the 1950s horror movie that gave Steve McQueen his first starring role. We were taking
a soak together in my Jacuzzi when he said his son and a friend had written a sequel
called
Beware! The Blob.

“You aren’t doing anything,” he said. “You want to direct it?”

I jumped at the chance. I also agreed to act and to help rewrite the script. I liked
the idea of working in a genre where nothing is too farfetched or too silly to put
on the screen. My biggest challenge became finding recognizable names who’d agree
to be in the movie for scale. I auditioned all kinds of people, but I ended up just
stopping people I knew on the beach. Like Carol Lynley. She was walking along and
I got her attention by yelling, “Hey, you want to be in
The Blob?”

“The what?” she asked.

“It’s the movie I’m directing.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Get eaten by the Blob.”

This seemed to pique her interest, and she signed on. I promised to do the same if
she ever did a movie. Godfrey Cambridge, who’d been in Ted Flicker’s Compass Theater,
an extemporaneous theater, in New York, came on board when I snared him walking down
the beach too. I also cast Richard Webb, radio’s original Captain Midnight, Shelley
Berman, Dick Van Patten, Cindy Williams, my assistant John Houser, my ten-year-old
son, and even my other next-door neighbor, Margie Adleman, who later sold her home,
with some finagling from Maj, to Burgess Meredith, another of the Blob’s victims.
To get the job, all you had to do was agree to be eaten by the Blob.

This turned into one of the most fun projects of my career. The picture started with
a shot of a cute little pussycat playing on the lawn outside a house. Then it cut
inside, where Godfrey puts down a canister he’d brought back from the tundra in the
Arctic, planning to examine it in his lab. But the can warms in his kitchen as he
watches TV in the next room, the contents thaw, the top pops off, and the fun begins.

First a fly sets down on the can’s rim, and
slup,
it’s eaten. Then the darling kitty comes into the kitchen and paws the red goop in
the can.
Gulp!
Finally, the Blob eats Godfrey, who was a mouthful since he weighed about three hundred
pounds. I wrote myself in as an addled deaf-mute, and like everybody in the film,
I too was ingested.

Beware! The Blob
wasn’t everyone’s taste. Though the original film
had been a cult classic that made lots of money,
Beware! The Blob
disappeared from theaters almost as quickly as that cute kitty. Reviewers didn’t
think too highly of it either, but I had the last laugh when it was rereleased in
1982 as “the movie J.R. shot.” But it’s really good, clean, silly fun for the whole
family.

*   *   *

The projects I did in the 1970s taught me that actors don’t care whether they’re on
TV or the big screen, they just like to work. I got a chance to work with so many
great actors. When I made
The Alpha Caper
in 1973, I got a second chance to work with Hank Fonda, who made acting look so easy.
Leonard Nimoy, James McEachin, and Elena Verdugo were also in that picture about ex-cons
who rob an armored car.

Then I was in
Blood Sport,
a father-son sports drama with Ben Johnson and Gary Busey, who displayed an abundance
of raw energy and ability as a high school quarterback. I played his coach and drew
from the guys I remembered from my brief stint on the football team in high school.
I remember thinking Gary was someone who had the chance to make it big, and he’s done
very well.