Crane (10 page)

Just one week earlier my dad had attended a high school graduation party for my sister Karen held at my mom and Chuck’s house. Dad had
canceled his play for that evening just so he could be there, and in the course of the afternoon he had a conversation with Chuck about his upcoming fiftieth birthday. He confided that he was seeing things differently, even mundane things. He told Chuck he was seeing the color orange for the first time, appreciating it—he believed he was on a different path. Today pundits would call it a sea change. He was going to try to reconstruct his life after getting out of his marriage to Patti. He’d already taken the first step by putting a $5,000 deposit on a house in Sherman Oaks, another Valley community. My dad had very few friends, yet despite that, it was my feeling that jettisoning John Carpenter was to be part of his planned rejuvenation. Dad had told me he felt Carpenter had devolved from being a fun-seeking friend to a hanger-on, a parasite. He was seeing a new horizon and was excited about it.

That image is burned in my brainpan: Chuck and my dad sitting in the backyard, looking out over the San Fernando Valley below. I thought at the time how strange that tableau was. It was uncomfortable for me to see my dad and my stepdad talking to each other (they had both made love to my mother, for one thing), but on the other hand how nice it was that they could have that quiet, intimate moment together without any animosity. I think they appreciated each other. They were two very different men, much like the kind of guests my dad liked to book on his radio show—one frenetic and funny, the other quiet and thoughtful—but there they were making the best of it for the family.

Although they were the same age, Chuck had the serene confidence and demeanor of a teacher, whereas my dad seemed always to be on a quest, like a young student. They had both been married twenty years to their first spouses. My dad was the father of four children and stepfather of one, and Chuck the stepfather of three. Chuck was the anticelebrity with no ego. He lived his life according to a strong moral code. He took his time thinking things through before reaching a decision, and his judgments were correct almost all of the time. My dad lacked patience and jumped in feet first, though I never saw him dive headfirst. He always anticipated the best and shrugged off the worst.

I tried to reconcile myself to the fact that my dad was dead, and I wondered about the changes coming into all the lives connected to him. My dad wouldn’t see his children get married. He wouldn’t see any of our achievements. He wouldn’t see us get older, mature. We would miss seeing him get older. He was now going to be locked in forever at forty-nine,
two weeks shy of fifty. He wouldn’t see the changes he had talked about with Chuck actually happen. I wanted him to see the color orange. I wanted him to see new things because he could not have continued down the path he had been on much longer. What we’ve come to know as sex addiction wasn’t talked about at that time. We didn’t even talk about alcoholism in public. There was no Betty Ford Clinic, no
Celebrity Rehab
on television, no Doctors Phil or Drew. Those were all big-sky thoughts, lying there in the warm night staring at the stars through misty eyes.

Then I was also confronted by practical questions. Where would I live? I would have to move out of the apartment. I didn’t earn enough money as a freelance writer to afford a two-bedroom in Westwood. What would happen to all my dad’s equipment? He was in the middle of a divorce, but he was still married, technically, and I was guessing Patti still had certain rights. I worried about all this and about getting on a plane the next day, flying back to Burbank, getting in my car and driving back to the apartment I share with my dad. My dad who’s dead.

10

After shooting the first two seasons at Paramount Studios, the
Hogan’s Heroes
company moved west a few blocks to the smaller Desilu Cahuenga lot.
The Andy Griffith Show, That Girl,
and
The Dick Van Dyke Show
all maintained soundstages and offices there. My dad had a small dressing room onstage, filled to bursting with a drum set, turntable, stereo equipment, and hundreds of albums. Between takes or while the crew was lighting the next scene, he would crank up the volume and drum to his heart’s content. It was a stress release for him as well as the other actors and technicians who were within earshot. When the second assistant director would signal to him that they were ready to film the next setup, off went Harry James or Quincy Jones, and the stage would return to its whisper-quiet mode.

My dad was struggling with playing two distinct and conflicting roles. First, he was the sociable host of the amusement park for grown-ups known as the
Hogan’s Heroes
set. It was a land where everyone had a great time. The cast and crew all got along really well, with the glaring exception of Richard Dawson and my dad. The chief reason for their simmering animosity was that Dawson had read for the starring role of Hogan but wound up in the supporting role of the Eastender Newkirk. He did a decent job, considering he was basically a comedian and not an actor, but Dawson always believed he should have been Hogan and my dad was the pretender on his throne. My dad’s other role was that of the Catholic, churchgoing husband and father in charge of house and home, though he had relinquished much of that duty to my mom a long time before.

As the crow flies, the
Hogan’s
set and not-so-posh Tarzana were fewer than twenty miles apart, but they represented two divorced worlds. My
dad’s frenetic days were spent in the wacky POW camp, complete with steak lunches, laughter galore with the actors from both Allied and German forces, and visits to the set from the likes of Lucille Ball, John Wayne, and an unending phalanx of models. These daytime labors were followed by evenings spent with a civilian wife, a critical mother-in-law, three rank-and-file kids, a German shepherd named Penny, and a small, gray poodle of indeterminate heritage named Candy, who had a habit of hacking up some kind of pellet whenever anyone but my mom tried to pet her. For my dad it wasn’t just a different world, it was a different galaxy, and he tried mightily to keep the artificial pyrotechnics of the set from becoming emotional explosions on the home front.

In addition to his on-set digs, my dad also had a larger dressing room offstage in the building that housed producer Edward H. Feldman and his production staff. That petite white bungalow included a small living room and kitchen area, and could have doubled for the
Hogan’s Heroes
editing room, just yards away, where the real work was done. Film editors Jerry London, who later directed ten episodes of the series and
Shogun,
among a hundred other credits, and Michael Kahn, who later became Steven Spielberg’s editor beginning with
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and who has, to date, won three Academy Awards, helped shape each episode. They were integral parts of a successful series. At the end of each season, London, Kahn, and my dad would go through all the out-take footage—where actors flubbed their lines or started to laugh in the middle of a scene or when a light stand fell or there were costume malfunctions—and put together the best bits for a gag reel, which they showed at the season’s wrap party. The
Hogan’s
blooper reel became a highly anticipated yearly staple, and my dad would make copies for everyone in the cast and crew.

While legitimate work was being done in London and Kahn’s room, Colonel Hogan’s dressing room had a very different mission statement. It reflected a growing fanaticism with gadgets and a private, personal obsession that would later threaten to undermine everything this workaholic man had built from nothing. My dad was losing his perspective, developing a dangerous tunnel vision. He was raising a curtain of hypocrisy that had clouded his true self, but his new behavior was becoming counterproductive to achieving his aspirations.

For one thing, my dad’s dressing room was turning into porn central. There were strips of film, negatives, film cans, still and video cameras
everywhere. The red light was always on in my dad’s makeshift film-processing lab in the bathroom. He spent his “off-duty” time developing hundreds of photographs of the actresses and Playboy Playmates who were always stopping by the set—ostensibly to visit Brit bachelor-about-town Richard Dawson, but they soon became enamored with his commanding officer. It seemed word was out that the
Hogan’s
set was the place to market your wares if you were young, shapely, and of the female persuasion.

Dawson’s friend John Henry Carpenter, a Sony video equipment salesperson, aided and abetted my dad, helping to transform his dressing room into a makeshift movie theater where the latest sixteen-millimeter porno films were projected onto a wall and copied to videotape by means of a Sony video camera taping the film, much the way first-run films are pirated today. This crude version of the Deluxe, Fotokem, or CFI labs could be dismantled in minutes if need be.

When I was sixteen and visiting the
Hogan’s
set that summer, I was exposed to an “actress” named Candy Barr’s talents when my dad set up his sixteen-millimeter projector to premiere her latest sextravaganza. Candy Barr had been arrested in Texas for performing oral sex, so she refused to do that on film, but she did just about everything else before my unblinking teenaged eyes. This might have been my dad’s clumsy, Hollywood way of having a “birds and bees” talk with his coming-of-age son, but what strikes me now looking back is that his equipment-laden room was another in a series of tech-heavy habitats that grew progressively darker. What started in the bright innocence of the back room of our house with all its music and editing paraphernalia eventually transferred to the dim Westwood apartment with its snare of wires, monitors, and videotape decks, then ultimately morphed into the grisly crime scene in Scottsdale with its lablike display of oversized video camera, metallic freight luggage, and strips of film negatives hanging spent and passionless in the makeshift darkroom/bathroom.

It was as though the same set designer and set dresser had been hired at all these locations but over the years had grown jaded and weary in his work. I only wish the Scottsdale apartment had been a set and the tawdry drama that played out within its walls a long-forgotten made-for-TV movie.

My dad’s relationship with Carpenter created an intimacy and dependency that each assumed had no consequences. As my dad’s popularity
level rose, he became less and less certain of what his own life meant, both to himself and to his family. His Carpenter-assisted
cinéma du Hogan
could take place only in Hollywood, far from the friendly confines of the Vanalden house, where the only titillating artworks were the occasional seminude jazz or soul album cover and a substantial stack of
Playboy
magazines tucked away in the back room closet.

I began spending more and more hours alone in the back room. The siren sound of the thick wooden closet door’s plastic rollers sliding over their metallic track bracketed my visits to the hidden flesh palace within. One day my mom decided to drop in while I was enjoying a layout featuring a healthy, freshly scrubbed maiden from Takemyclothesplease, USA. Mom rapidly deduced I wasn’t drumming, playing records, or watching television since I was sitting cross-legged in front of the closet—and not because my interest in anatomy was going to lead to a career in medicine. I noticed her reddish-blonde hair first as she peeked around the corner of the wall of record album shelving. With no time to bid adieu to the lassie from Lascivious, Ohio, my face turned communist red. I was busted.

Embarrassed, Mom yelled, “Wait till your father gets home!”

Yeah, right, I thought. If she only knew.

As my skin color and body temperature returned to normal, I felt ashamed, and I mentally flogged myself for being such a disappointment to my mom. At that moment it was unfathomable to me that I would one day not only regularly write for
Playboy,
but actually
read
the magazine as well.

In that faraway nebula of Tarzana, my days were spent at William Howard Taft High School in Woodland Hills, where I persisted in my B academic world with no career objective on the horizon, although I was occasionally tickled by a creative writing, photography, or art class. I spent an exorbitant amount of effort trying to fly below the radar, trying to fit in, trying to hide the fact that my dad was a television star on a popular series on a major network. This was back in the day when a hit show pulled in 30 million viewers a week.

It was okay if kids disliked me because I was a jerk, but not because they thought my dad’s TV show sucked, or he sucked as an actor, or that World War II sucked, or that Germans are a sweet, fun-loving group of people who just enjoy invading other countries. I always wondered if the son of someone like the heart surgeon Michael DeBakey would ever get knocked for the association. “Man, your dad’s transplants suck!” But
when you’re performing in the arts or sports, you’re wide open to the critics, the fans, the crazies, the people who are infatuated with you or resent you simply because they aren’t in the spotlight. And they should be, dammit!