Crane (11 page)

Junior high had been fun, but high school seemed a long road paved with life’s mediocrity that lay ahead and the immediate fear of ridicule. Just to persist through the three years, grades 10, 11, and 12, was a survival test. Some kids had Scouts or Pony League or the school marching band to escape into away from problems at home or the hurt generated by mocking schoolmates. More and more, I enjoyed decamping behind the barbwire of Stalag 13 during my teenage years. It was a safe, insulated sanctuary apart from the judgment of my peers. It was also a great escape.

With
Hogan’s Heroes
a big hit on CBS, the executives at Black Rock in Manhattan looked for creative avenues to exploit the series’ popularity. Someone working for William Paley, head of the corporation, had seen my dad drum on
The Red Skelton Hour
and said that he wasn’t half bad. Calls were made to agents in Los Angeles, and soon my dad was drumming with musical veterans like Ray Brown on bass, with Ernie Freeman arranging and Stu Phillips producing. Some of the players had worked with Sinatra. My dad filmed
Hogan’s
during the day and recorded music at night.

The resulting album of television theme music, produced by Epic Records, a subsidiary of Columbia Records, which was owned by CBS, was called
Bob Crane (Colonel Hogan), His Drums, and Orchestra Play the Funny Side of TV.
Some of the theme songs, like those for
Get Smart
and
F Troop,
featured gimmicklike voices and sound effects not unlike those my dad had used on his radio show. John Banner did a spoken-word cameo as Sergeant Schultz on the
Hogan’s Heroes
track. The album was recorded in the Columbia Records studio in the basement of the KNX Radio building at Sunset and Gower. My dad had returned to the scene of his earlier radio success but now as a television star. I went to the sessions, bringing along my school homework, as if I was going to work on it. Some of those sessions went late into the night. My dad was ecstatic, back in the world of the big band, laughing and playing alongside some of the best session players in Los Angeles.

Naturally, Epic Records wanted a
Hogan’s Heroes
tie-in for the cover artwork so CBS could place ads for the album in
TV Guide
and other extensively circulated magazines. The result was a drum set being placed
in the middle of the Stalag 13 set—Hogan behind the drums—surrounded by Colonel Klink, his secretary, Hilda, and Sergeant Schultz, all in costume, of course. The photographer, Gene Howard, suggested using an extra German soldier, weapon menacingly pointed in their direction, to give the tableau an “authentic” look. Since I was visiting the set in Culver City my dad pitched me as the guard. Or, rather, strongly suggested that I could deliver what Howard needed for the photograph. I was sixteen, so perhaps too young to play a German soldier convincingly, but I gave it my best shot, turning on a glowering look of intimidation. As I was getting into my storm trooper uniform, complete with helmet and machine gun, my thoughts returned to childhood days spent playing army with Ron Heck, emulating
Combat!
and Vic Morrow as Sergeant Chip Saunders, spending hours in our backyards fending off imaginary onslaughts of “Jerries.” Now here I was, kitted out as the young Aryan who would have been machine-gunned or blown up by my
Combat!
hero. It seemed like an honor.

I didn’t have to learn any lines. I didn’t have to speak. I just had to stand there with my rubber machine gun pointed at the stars of
Hogan’s Heroes.
Howard went through a couple of rolls of film capturing what the publicity department at Epic Records was after.

I thought it was great that my dad included me in his project, even if it was just throwing me a bone. His unyielding father had never thrown him so much as gristle. There was a price for laughter in that family—a laugh had to be earned. I think my dad may have developed his quick wit as a form of rebellion against his stern, stoic Connecticut family. In Culver City on that photo shoot, the laughs were plentiful and easy, and my rubber Mauser and I were a part of the fun.

Despite the ads in
TV Guide,
Bob “Colonel Hogan” Crane’s album stiffed, notwithstanding his gimmicks, sounds effects, and drumming sessions with some of the best musicians in town. Listening to Hogan drum to the
My Three Sons
theme song couldn’t draw a $5 bill out of even the most dedicated fan’s wallet. Still, my dad thought the experience was worth it. His one and only album completed his recording contract. And I thought it was cool. I mean, the Yardbirds recorded for Epic Records. Years later, Epic would become home to some squeaky-clean, moonwalking kid from Gary, Indiana, name of Jackson.

Despite
Hogan’s
being a hit and generating millions of dollars for CBS, Paramount, and Bing Crosby Productions, my dad didn’t seek out
perks. He didn’t get driven to the set of
Hogan’s Heroes
in a limousine; he preferred to drive his own car, memorizing his lines for the day’s scenes on his way to Hollywood or Culver City. When I got a driver’s license, I would drop him off at the airport when he was going out of town, and he would make his own way through the check-in protocol without studio publicity department handlers or airline VIP escorts. That may have been the movie star world, but it wasn’t Planet Crane. My parents were self-reliant, just like the pioneers they once were. That changed when my dad met Patti in
Hogan’s
second season. Then it was as though he ceded all control of his destiny to her.

11

I don’t recall ever going to bed on the night following my dad’s murder. I was sitting out by the pool of the Hellhole Motel on the fringe of Scottsdale, staring at the stars and thinking about the impact of my dad’s death on Patti and her son and daughter and how the whole radioactive scene of her divorce from my dad had just been hosed down, demagnetized like so much used videotape. And all of it to Patti’s advantage.

My dad had phoned me the day after Father’s Day, June 18. “Bobby, you’ll never believe who showed up here yesterday,” he said. I could almost see him shaking his head.

I immediately started thinking of all the actresses or other women of interest to my dad. Gina Lollobrigida. Lee Remick. Stripper Angel Carter from the Classic Cat in Hollywood. There was a cast of thousands. “I have no idea,” I said finally.

“Patti and Scotty,” he said.

“You’re kidding! How did that happen?”

“They spent the night. It was very uncomfortable for everybody. I went out for a while with Scotty. We went to the park in the neighborhood. I was pretty relieved when they left.”

My dad was put off balance by Patti’s sudden appearance. He sounded completely bewildered to me, which was remarkable because he was almost never at a loss like that. My dad and Patti were just weeks from the decree finalizing their divorce. They were in the middle of World War III. Why would Patti do that after all the vitriol? Six months earlier, in her divorce petition, she had called my dad an unfit father who, among other grievances, showed his young son pornographic videotapes. The press had jumped all over that—“Hogan’s a Pervert!” Of course, my dad denied those accusations, and that’s when attorneys became involved and things turned really ugly. Maybe Patti was trying to con my dad into thinking they still had a marriage, but that was a lost cause. My dad was
gone on that issue. He was moving ahead, getting on with his life. Perhaps she did it as a show for the attorneys or even for the court, but Patti never lost sight of the fact that there was a lot of property at stake for her.

To this day I don’t know how she knew where he was staying. Patti knew my dad was going to be in Scottsdale only for a couple more weeks, and she was uncertain what was going to happen when he got home. She did not like uncertainty. I think she was there on a combination reconnaissance mission and a kind of perverted, half-assed attempt to show her son what a wonderful mother she was by taking him to see his dad, even though it was the worst possible time to do that. I think it was all for show. Her visit was especially odd considering that the only intercourse Patti and my dad were having was the volley of threatening letters that ricocheted between their divorce attorneys.

Was she getting the layout of enemy territory? Was she the scout for the agent or agents of destruction that would follow in her wake? Did she just want a few minutes alone in my dad’s apartment to look for something or things known only to her? After the murder it was discovered that one of the two sets of keys for the apartment was missing. Did Patti pick them up while she was there? The police never found the keys, nor did they ever seriously investigate Patti’s possible participation, active or otherwise.

In the morning, Lloyd Vaughn, Bill Goldstein, and I had breakfast together before going to the Scottsdale Police Department. I felt a little wobbly emotionally. We talked to Detective Dennis Borkenhagen and Lieutenant Ron Dean, who were leading the investigation. While they were asking me about jealous boyfriends of cocktail waitresses I kept reiterating that they needed to take a closer look at Patti’s motives and movements. They ignored me. They had their noses down on their own trail of clues.

Vaughn, Goldstein, and I boarded a plane and flew back to Burbank. I thanked Lloyd and Bill for all their help, got in my car, and drove to the Westwood apartment I had shared with my dad. I knew my time there was on life support. A security guard was standing outside the front door. I didn’t know who he was, who he was affiliated with, or on whose behalf he was there. The guard was about my age, with bad skin, and we talked for a minute. He was just there doing his job and didn’t know anything about anything. His job was to secure the apartment. He was, it turned out, hired by Patti to make sure nothing was taken from the apartment,
and in performing his duties he refused to let me into my own home. I showed him my key, explained I had been living there for the past six months with my dad, and told him I needed to go into the apartment. He went in to phone his superiors, leaving me standing on the front step, door shut in my face, like an unwanted peddler. Somebody contacted Patti. After what seemed like hours of haggling I was allowed into the apartment—provided that the first night I was there the guard stayed inside the apartment too.

I went into my bedroom and locked the door. It was surreal to me that my dad had just been killed by person or persons unknown while he slept, and here I was in my apartment all night with a gun-toting stranger in the next room. I didn’t sleep much that night, either.

12

The role of the lothario had hovered over my dad’s career since his walk-on in
The New Interns
as Drunk Guy at Party with up-and-coming contract players like George Segal, Michael Callan, and Stefanie Powers. That epic was shot at Columbia Pictures at Sunset and Gower across the street from his morning gig at KNX and was an early opportunity for him to spend a few hours on a set. From there it was the break offered by Carl Reiner to appear as a philandering husband on
The Dick Van Dyke Show
followed by two seasons as Carl Betz’s good-time dentist friend on
The Donna Reed Show.
Then there was Colonel Hogan, a role that was as close to playing his hero, Jack Lemmon, as my dad would ever experience. Besides squeezing out some Lemmon, my dad gave Hogan the appropriate look of the day—a combination of James Garner, Robert Culp, Robert Vaughn, Robert Conrad, and Gig Young.

After a few seasons of
Hogan’s Heroes,
which by then was a well-oiled machine and a favorite at Black Rock in Manhattan, my dad jumped at the chance to costar in a motion picture with the red-hot European bomb-shell Elke Sommer. The script for
The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz
had never had any fingerprints of Garner, Culp, Vaughn, Conrad, or Young on it because it was toxic. The film was directed by George Marshall, a Hollywood veteran in his seventies who had distinguished himself with the likes of Laurel and Hardy, Bob Hope, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, but who was not fully connected to the hip late 1960s. His style of filmmaking and the look of the film, with its limp attempts at comedy, were relics of the ’40s and ’50s. Sommer was a nonactress who had appeared nude in many of her films as a way of unleashing her thespian gifts. She had graced the pages of
Playboy
magazine, which was why I was personally enthused about visiting the set. The director, the crew, the script, shooting at the nearly shuttered MGM lot, all cried archaic, antiquated, and out of touch. As a last-ditch effort to salvage some kind of
box office viability, the producer threw in Werner Klemperer, John Banner, and Leon Askin from
Hogan’s
in an effort to inject some lifeblood into an otherwise DOA project.

My dad, playing an American conman in cold war Germany instead of World War II Germany, knew the film was a dinosaur in both method and message. This was 1968, and the
New York Times
made the intriguing choice of feminist author Renata Adler to review the film. She wrote on behalf of her sisters and the changes in the air for women’s rights when she pointed out just how old-fashioned, chauvinistic, and downright dreadful the story and depiction of women were and how the film’s male characters (specifically my dad) were Neanderthal in their dealings with women. I hurt for my dad, who didn’t know Gloria Steinem from Mamie Van Doren. What he did know was that his smile couldn’t make up for such a vulgar script. His charm reserve tank had nowhere near the capacity to keep that baby rolling. Colonel Hogan was a winner because solid dialogue and situations propped him up and producer Ed Feldman served as quality-control inspector.