Crane (16 page)

Now, Diane and I had an open, frank, and sincere relationship. After all, it was the age of honesty, full disclosure. It was the Age of Aquarius, for God’s sake. I decided to tell Diane I had slept with Laura. I would display integrity, candor, uprightness. I would behave like an adult. Wrong decision. Fuck integrity. Fuck candor. Fuck uprightness. Fuck being an adult. Diane felt betrayed. We didn’t see each other for months after my Honest Abe routine. I had seriously fucked up.

Shortly thereafter Diane left USC for the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where she met bright, sexy, worldly art professors and fellow students and formed new relationships. Our pure, raw bond, our sharing of secrets and bodies, was gone. We still loved each other, but the pull of new experiences aggravated the fissure. I was responsible for shattering our marriage dream. I had let down the most important person in the world.

In any event, a new recruit joined the cast in June 1971. Now, my dad was christened Robert Edward Crane, and I am Robert David Crane, so I am not and have never wanted to be a “Junior” although the sobriquet gets pinned on me often. Patti and my dad’s new baby boy was named Robert Scott Crane. Who the hell did my dad think he was, George Foreman? When I was told about the name I held my tongue. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t storm out of the room in disgust, in spite of being hurt to the core. The story my dad told me was that Patti, who had had three stepfathers, always felt closest to the one named Robert. I could only shake my head in wounded and pathetic amazement.

“Don’t worry, Bobby,” my dad said cheerfully, “we’re gonna call him Scotty.”

I wanted to grab him and scream, “Then why don’t you name him Scott Crane? Why didn’t you tell Patti you’ve already got a son named Robert? Why the fuck don’t you just call him Ishmael?” I didn’t. I couldn’t.

My dad’s philosophy of “Don’t make waves” obviously didn’t extend to his firstborn’s feelings. I never discussed it with him, but I felt betrayed, like I was being forgotten, erased just like a piece of audiotape. I also felt
it was a power play on Patti’s part. She wanted what she wanted. There was no regard for my feelings in the equation, and my dad failed miserably to stand up for me. In fact, he just bent over and said, “Thank you. I’ll have another.”

Basically, Patti hated everyone on my dad’s side of the family. That included me, my sisters, my dad’s mother, and my mom. None of us could bring anything positive to Patti’s life as far as she was concerned. We were a nuisance, an irritant, part of my dad’s history that she couldn’t wish away. We were all flies in her Cabernet.

16

In 1971 CBS cleaned house on its primetime schedule, eliminating past favorites like
Green Acres
and
Hogan’s Heroes.
Ed Feldman was informed of the cancellation a month before his team was to have started shooting its seventh season. Everyone involved felt there was at least one more season left in the tank. But as a result of CBS’s action,
Hogan’s
didn’t get to make a series’ finale episode. Hogan and the POWs could have been liberated and poor Klink and Schultz could have been captured and sent to an Allied forces’ POW camp, but we’ll never know. Still, as it was,
Hogan’s Heroes
lasted longer than World War II.

At this time, Walt Disney Pictures was at its lowest output and quality levels. The studio was undergoing a major transition. It had been almost a decade since
Mary Poppins,
and another decade would pass before the transformation by the Michael Eisner regime. In the meantime, the studio produced tired comedies starring Don Knotts, Tim Conway, and Kurt Russell (still in his cute and goofy mode before his action-hero mode).

Though my dad was famous worldwide as Colonel Hogan, he still admired and wanted to emulate the careers of Jack Lemmon, Gig Young, and Cary Grant. Unfortunately, the acme of my dad’s career and fame coincided with the nadir of Disney’s creativity, and the result of this unlucky convergence was
Superdad.
The only movie my dad would ever star in was a comedy as out of touch with 1972 contemporary humor as the Elke Sommer skinfest had been with the swinging ’60s. It was written and directed by another gaggle of Hollywood veterans who were just going through the motions in the dark at the end of their careers.

The fatigued story of an overly protective father trying to turn back time and delay the development of his teenaged daughter made the viewer wistful for former Disney hit comedies like
The Parent Trap
or
The Absent-minded Professor.
In
Superdad,
Joe Flynn and Dick Van Patten did their predictable comedic turns, and Barbara Rush, who had worked with
Sinatra, looked and behaved more like my dad’s mother than his wife. Sensibly, Kurt Russell would bolt the Disney stable after appearing in
Superdad.
Two other castmates who played teenaged hooligans were the actors B. Kirby Jr., later known as Bruno Kirby (who went on to play the young Clemenza in the masterpiece
Godfather 2
), and Ed Begley Jr. (who later appeared in the Christopher Guest films
Best in Show
and
A Mighty Wind
). Interestingly enough, thirty years later, Ed Begley Jr. would also appear in
Auto Focus,
Paul Schrader’s Calvinist take on the temptations of Bob Crane and the sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s, a film on which I consulted with Schrader with respect to Michael Gerbosi’s script. As it happened, Ed and I were the only two participants in
Auto Focus
who had actually ever met my dad. But I digress.

Disney executives at the time of the making of
Superdad
were not pleased by the rumors circulating around Hollywood suggesting that their new Dean Jones had a penchant for home movies that would make more than Bashful blush. Disney CEO Ron Miller sat on
Superdad
for a year and a half before finally releasing the film during the permafrost season early in 1974.
Superdad
’s quality level can only be described by the title of a hit from another era—
Superbad.
It tanked without even coming up for air once.

It also turned out that showing Polaroids and videotape of naked women to cast and crew was not a good move for a would-be Disney star. The publicity department could handle rumors of Julie Andrews’s sexual preferences or Dick Van Dyke’s drinking problem, but raw footage of partying females being exhibited on the same lot where Minnie Mouse lived? My dad was not gonna get work cleaning Mary Poppins’s chimney doing that. But my dad was clueless in that regard. Film executives, producers, directors, and publicists had lunch together. They talked. My dad believed that his product—his smile, laugh, quickness, volume—would still carry the day regardless of his hobbies. He would sell the charm, the handsome face, the funny cadence of saying words, and those qualities would trump the backstage talk, the gossip, the coworkers going silent when he walked into a room.

Like most men, I’ve always had a profound interest in the opposite sex, but alongside it I also have a deep-seated respect for women, probably owing to the fact that I was raised by and surrounded by them. Still, I suspect that a large percentage of men, in their private, testosterone-poisoned brains, think about women and sex as much as my dad did. The
difference being that my dad stripped the gears of the transmission that engages the thought to the deed. He didn’t realize that just because he was on TV not everyone would be interested in him airing his privates. He would have fit right in with the lovefests of the ’60s Haight-Ashbury community if he hadn’t been a Republican.

As a fringe Hollywood family, we never attended movie premieres. Nowadays, the cast of
Duck Dynasty
or Snooki might show up at a premiere, much to the delight of the fans. Jenny McCarthy smiles her goofy smile, Paula Abdul staggers, Kat Von D. shows off her latest ink, Melissa Rivers whines while keeping a firm grip on her mother’s spectral coattails. My family never received an invitation to a big-time Hollywood premiere. Movies were for movie stars. TV stars need not apply.

Instead, my dad and I attended the West Coast premiere of the X-rated
Deep Throat
at the Pussycat Theatre on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. No limos for this red carpet event. Actually, we lucked out and found a parking space on a side street a couple of blocks away and walked to the box office. In lieu of klieg lights, silver screen luminaries, and adoring fans, the sidewalk throng consisted of a few homeless people, panhandlers, and streetwalkers. The Pussycat Theatre staff ushered us down a soggy red carpet into the hall. My dad stopped to talk with porno producers, actors, distributors, and their polyester-clad publicists. They couldn’t believe Colonel Hogan was there, that he might be one of them. But my dad never made class distinctions. He didn’t think of himself as a TV star. He thought of himself as the same as everyone else in that theater—paying the rent, having the car repaired, dropping off the dry cleaning, looking for a break. For him it was no different from going to a Disney movie. This just happened to be
The Absent-Minded Pornfessor.

The premiere of
Deep Throat
was a prime example of a Fellini Excursion. That’s a thing my dad and I had, an homage to Federico Fellini and all the bizarre images and people in his films. Whenever we encountered wild, weird, wonderful happenings, we would just look at each other and say, “Fellini Excursion.” Here’s an example: one time we went to Las Vegas for a bocce ball tournament at Caesar’s Palace. This was in the early ’70s, before Vegas really became the adult Disneyland. Caesar’s was the big hotel of the moment, boasting an enormous enclosed sporting venue where the bocce courts were set up. My dad was there to play for a charity fund-raiser, as was (more of a thrill for me) Joe DiMaggio. DiMaggio was very grumpy. He had one expression for the whole event,
and that was “Get me out of this fuckin’ place.” At one point my dad and I looked at each other as the Yankee Clipper tossed his balls in the sand and said simultaneously, “Fellini Excursion.” The significance of Fellini Excursions for me was that I was sharing time with my dad. Just him and me. No matter how bizarre the events, the fact that we were experiencing them together is what I remember and what was important.

Back at the Pussycat, my dad was mingling and signing autographs. I declined to shake anyone’s hand. For a brief moment I enjoyed the novelty of my first time in a XXX theater, but sitting in a thinly cushioned seat with my feet on a sticky floor watching some poor young woman bare her talents on the not-so-silver screen quickly lost its allure. After the second or third time Linda Lovelace orally pleasured some slick, greasy-looking guy, I started thinking about the chores I had to do the next day. But
Deep Throat
became a phenomenon, and Linda Lovelace became a “star” in a raincoat-cloaked universe. If Lovelace were alive today, she would be showing up at the same events as Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, and Lindsay Lohan, comparing tattoos with the cast of
Jackass.

Inevitably, it didn’t take long until my dad secured his own video copy of
Deep Throat.
He reedited the film, intercutting scenes of Lovelace going down on a nonunion actor while a rocket blasts off with clips of his favorite
Tonight Show
acts appearing with Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon—“Hi-yo!” He did it just to do it, just to enjoy the editing process and technology and, of course, to get a laugh. The next time he and his dinner theater castmates were killing endless days before evening performances in Fort Lauderdale or Traverse City, he could whip out this latest creative effort to delight the crowd. My dad’s homespun productions put a new twist on watching television. And viewing the tape once was never enough. My dad was the Pied Piper of Porn, attracting friendly dinner theater employees, stage managers, and makeup artists who would join the cast at my dad’s apartment or hotel room for a screening. The state-of-the-art equipment coupled with scenes of the new film icon Lovelace made for a memorable party. Word traveled fast through places like Lake Charles and Jacksonville that Crane’s porno palace and laugh salon was the place to be, and an invitation should be had if at all possible while the show was in town. My dad had too much downtime and no structure. He never made the connection that his way of killing time was also killing his career.

My dad and I spent a lot of time together driving around Los Angeles.
He always had a lot of errands. He had to go pick up something for Patti, drop off film for processing, or make a bank deposit. For lunch we often went to a burger joint next to the car wash at the corner of Westwood and Santa Monica boulevards. We’d sit in the car, eat burgers, drink Cokes, and talk. We talked a lot. As I entered my twenties, I became his unofficial junior agent, offering my take on choices relating to his career and the agents, managers, publicists, directors, and actors he dealt with. My dad always listened to me, but he didn’t completely trust anyone’s judgment and that included mine. I was still a nonprofessional who hadn’t opened any doors for anyone.

After
Hogan’s,
my dad really lost structure. He missed Edward H. Feldman. He traveled the country appearing in his brisk ninety-minute play cum neo-stand-up routine,
Beginner’s Luck,
which he could have performed in his sleep. He was doing his Willy Loman best to pay his alimony and child support to my mom while also sustaining his second wife’s real estate hunger. He was to be praised for his financial due diligence, but he was also watering the hillside of his own slippery slope. Outside of a few hours onstage six nights a week at the dinner theater playing himself, the rest of his days were spent like a college freshman who attends all the parties and none of the classes. There was too much free time for the former Catholic altar boy, who was now allowed to be himself. This was where the publicist’s dream story of the small-town drummer and radio host who rose to the top of the Nielsen ratings as the All-American highflier the audience rooted for crashed and burned.