Crane (2 page)

My dad was in Scottsdale, Arizona, doing his play
Beginner’s Luck
for the thousandth time. I had talked to him two days earlier, on my twenty-seventh
birthday. I was feeling pretty good when the phone rang. It was John Henry Carpenter, a salesman for Sony and Akai and my dad’s best buddy. Carpenter, fiftyish, stood a stocky five foot eight and had Native American blood in his veins, which gave his face and especially his hooked nose a chiseled look. He looked almost Incan. He kept his longish hair synthetically black, wore Beatle boots, shirts with long pointed collars, and tight flared pants. Carpenter was married, but minimally. He had relationships with teenaged girls. He had relationships with guys, too, I would find out later. He did it all—threesomes, orgies, you name it. He would meet up with my dad on the road, ostensibly on a business trip. His salesman position with Sony and Akai was more than his job description implied—it gave him entrée to the stars, supplying Hollywood’s boldfaced names with the latest cutting-edge gadgetry.

This was a new business at the time, all predigital, very primitive compared to today’s toys. Carpenter hooked my dad up with all his newest and most advanced gear. Others in Carpenter’s Rolodex included Tommy Smothers, Sammy Davis Jr., Richard Dawson (who was also on
Hogan’s Heroes
), and other film industry people who were interested in the next wave of whizbang gizmos. Everybody had a stereo, everybody had speakers set up, and home video was the next big thing. It was no longer eight-millimeter and Super 8 film. It was now videotape, with cameras that resembled space junk from Russia that fell to earth from Cosmo-7. It took no small effort to move them around. You could hand-hold them, but you were still tethered by cables to the tape deck, so there was virtually no mobility. The best way to use the video camera was to put it on a tripod so you could at least swivel it. We’re so spoiled now by having cameras in our phones, iPods, iPads. It’s Dick Tracy stuff now, but that’s where we were in ’78.

So there I am in front of the typewriter, headphones on, cassette recorder clicking on and off, on and off, transcribing my interview when the phone rings. Carpenter would often call me before hitting the road on a business trip when he could maneuver a detour in his itinerary to visit my dad. He’d say, “Your dad wants me to bring that new multiheaded cable he’s got that hooks up to the back of the Akai tape deck,” or “I’ve gotta stop by and pick up some extra Beta cartridges to take with me.” It was always before his trip he phoned, never after. Calling me when he got back never happened until June 29.

“Hey, John, what’s going on?” I asked.

“Nothing much. I just wanted you to know I was back in L.A.”

“Yeah. Okay. How was the trip?”

“Good, Bobby, good. Listen, if there’s anything you need, call me.” The whole conversation lasted less than a minute. After Carpenter hung up it was like a scene from a movie: I just stared at the phone, replaying what had just happened. There was something off, something out of sync.

My dad and Carpenter had a weird symbiotic friendship. Carpenter would help my dad solve videotape or camera problems by bringing him new parts from L.A. to those dinner theater capitals like Warren, Ohio, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, or Lake Charles, Louisiana. In return, my dad offered Carpenter the opportunity to hang out with a celebrity and experience the nightlife, such as it was, of Paramus, New Jersey, El Paso, Texas, or Traverse City, Michigan. They would go clubbing, meet women, and, odds were, get lucky.

After that uncomfortable phone call I went back to Chevy’s wild riffs on life at the top of the Hollywood heap. Half an hour went by. For some reason, I don’t know why, I just had the urge to call my dad, to check in with him, say “Hi,” see how he was doing, hear his voice. I called his apartment in Scottsdale, which was loaned along with a big American sedan to the “star” of each production that played the Windmill Dinner Theatre there.

A woman answered. That was not uncommon.

“Hi. Is Bob Crane there?”

“No. He’s not here right now.”

“Who’s this?”

“Victoria.”

Victoria was Victoria Berry, who was costarring in
Beginner’s Luck
at the time. She played the bimbo role, the squeaky-voiced blonde whose main character traits filled out the front of her dress. Her character was onstage for maybe ten minutes. My dad’s character, a low-level IBM executive, attempts to have his first extramarital affair with her but fails, and all hell breaks loose with his marriage in the two-act comedy.

“Can you tell him his son Bobby called? Nothing important. Just ask him to call me when he gets back.”

“Sure.”

I hung up and blithely went back to transcribing my tape.

2

In 1955 Bridgeport, Connecticut, was a working-class town. My mom and dad had a two-story apartment in a drab brick complex that looked like some kind of institutional housing project.

My dad was on the radio—WICC in Bridgeport. He had started as a staff announcer but evolved into the morning personality because of his catching sense of wildness and fun. Listeners preparing for another hum-drum day wanted a laugh, a smile to help kick things off. My dad provided giddiness, humor, and perhaps even the motivation to get out of bed. I was too young at four years old to figure out that he was different from other dads, but I knew he enjoyed what he did and he earned enough money to support us. He would spend hours in a small, soundproofed room talking fast and loud into a big microphone, and people would hear his voice in their cars or at home. I found that fascinating and became obsessed by the notion that on the radio no one could see you, but they could hear your voice. My dad had already done announcing work at a couple of smaller stations—WLEA in Hornell, New York, a town so small and rural in the early ’50s that cows were often seen being herded across the main street. Then he worked at WBIS in Bristol, Connecticut. Bridgeport was closer to Stamford, where my parents had grown up and where their families lived. Being away in those small towns, separated from his Annie and Bobby back in Bridgeport, had made my dad lonely and sad. There were also temptations for him living alone, but I wouldn’t find out about those until much later.

My dad had a quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape machine at home. I had been given a little brown microphone of my own, and I would imitate him—talking fast and loud, laughing, trying to make people happy, and showing my audience that I was having a good time. It was the
Bobby Crane Show.
I would tell silly jokes, relate stories and news from the apartment complex, and sing songs from shows like
The Mickey Mouse Club.
I
recorded my shows and played them back, listening to them with earphones. No one could see me. I thought that was exciting.

My dad played one of my tapes for my mom and grandparents and they laughed at the inane things I said, the observations I made with my semi-English accent. “Bird” was “bahrd.” It was not an affectation; it was just the way I talked. God knows where I picked it up. I was cute, unpredictable, and funny.

My dad thought it was time to put me on the real radio. Little Bobby being coached by dad to make the residents of Bridgeport laugh. I did
commercials. At four I was ready for prime time. In February 1956, I sang the theme for Borden’s Milk. I still have the 78-rpm disc containing the spot. The vinyl looks like it’s a quarter inch thick and the grooves were produced with a nail. I was just being a kid—raw thoughts originating in the underdeveloped mass of wiring in my brain streamed out through my mouth onto the airwaves. No editing. No inhibition. No denial. No restrictions. And, most attractive of all, anonymity. Nobody could see me. But they could hear me. I thought it was the world’s best job.

My dad supported my mom and me by being funny, playing music, and reading commercial copy. Pretty neat. My occasional appearances on his show as cute little Bobby were as close as I ever got to doing what my dad did.

I still love radio very much. The big-time radio personalities, the Rush Limbaughs of the world who are bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars, now broadcast out of home studios. Rush can spew his venom in his underwear. Behold the dangers of TV simulcasts.

Family life was almost perfect in small-town Connecticut, not far from the mother ships, my parents’ parents. But my dad saw a road that led out of Bridgeport. Being a DJ at WICC was not going to be the endgame for him. He refused to settle in his career. He had seen his father, Al, settle for his weekly paycheck at the furniture store. Food on the table, church on Sunday, to live and die in small-time suburbia. My dad had bigger ideas.

He kept mailing his demo reel out to radio station managers in New York City, the number one media center of the country, if not the world. That’s where Arthur Godfrey was. Where Jack Paar was. In that mecca were radio, television, stage, and movies. The station managers kept turning my dad down. There was no interest in a twenty-seven-year-old, fast-talking, quick-on-his-feet personality. The stations in New York had radio icons that had been on the air for decades.

However, CBS’s flagship radio station on the West Coast, KNX, was searching for a strong candidate for the morning show in the nation’s number two market. Ralph Story was leaving to host a revitalized edition of the famously crooked game show
The $64,000 Question,
which was being morphed into
The $64,000 Challenge.
CBS in New York was aware of my dad’s demo tape and the buzz in Connecticut about this morning guy, Bob Crane. Though there weren’t any slots available at WCBS in New York, the company wanted to get him into the CBS family and stop
the loss of listeners in the tristate area to this little broadcaster out of Bridgeport. So CBS sent the reel to Bob Sutton, the general manager of KNX in Los Angeles. Sutton loved what he heard—fun, light, upbeat, music—a good way to kick off the day. KNX/CBS hired my dad to be its 6:00 to 10:00 a.m. morning drive guy, six days a week, Monday through Saturday, the host who accompanies you on your drive from the Valley to downtown Los Angeles.

My parents became the pioneers of our family, traveling across the country not in a Conestoga but in an Oldsmobile complete with radiator bag on the front grille. They’d never been out of the Connecticut/New York/New Jersey area except for their honeymoon on Cape Cod in 1949.
I remember seeing photographs of Mom in her short shorts, wavy blonde hair almost reddish, sporting sunglasses, posing next to the Olds off the main highway in Oklahoma.

I stayed with Nan (pronounced “Non”), my mom’s mom, at her modest home in the Belltown section of Stamford. Nan was born Ellen Elvira Nikander in Helsingborg, Sweden, and met her future husband at the Feldman Estate in Tuxedo Park, New York. My grandfather, Alexander Terzian, was an Armenian Turk who lost his family in the genocide of 1915. Tuxedo Park was carved out of the Ramapo Mountains north of New York City in the 1880s to serve as a resort for blue-blooded members of New York society. Some of the early notables who lived behind the great stone gates of Tuxedo Park were J. P. Morgan, William Waldorf Astor, Adele Colgate, and Augustus Juilliard.

Nan was a domestic and my grandfather a chauffeur. Nan was a handsome woman with a short hairdo that required little maintenance. She had small blue eyes behind a pair of plain eyeglasses. She wore dentures. Her clothing was functional. She had a stolid personality reflecting a perpetual insecurity. She was an immigrant who was never quite able to accept herself as equal to “real” U.S. citizens. Nan sometimes behaved as though she was a fugitive whom someone in authority might ask for papers. Occasionally she would laugh over a good joke or something silly on television until she cried. That always led to a sneezing fit. She and my grandfather married, settled in Connecticut, and had two daughters, Ellen (nicknamed Bunny to avoid confusion with her mom and also because she loved the many rabbits that populated the family backyard) and my mom, Anne. My grandfather traded in his chauffeur’s uniform for chalk and tape to work in a tailor shop. In 1950 he went into the hospital for a routine operation and never came out—a victim of negligence; he contracted an infection that stampeded out of control. Today a member of the legal profession would be on that faster than you can say, “Weitz & Luxenberg.” But in those days, the wife with the thick Swedish accent just accepted her fate, buried her husband, and asked no questions. I never met my grandfather.