Crane (4 page)

With my dad’s radio salary providing comfort, my parents searched for a permanent base they could own—the American Dream, pride of ownership, their first house. They found an unpretentious three-bedroom on Donna Avenue in Tarzana, in the west San Fernando Valley. Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of
Tarzan,
used to have a large estate in the area on what is now Reseda Boulevard. Back in the ’20s and ’30s, the Valley consisted of immense orange groves and looked very much like scenes from
Chinatown.

The Ventura Freeway (the 101) didn’t exist; there were only surface streets. To get into Hollywood, one traveled Ventura Boulevard past the hamburger stands, car washes, and liquor stores. During school breaks, I would ride shotgun with my dad through the early-morning darkness into the big city to be in that radio environment that I loved from Connecticut—but the stakes were larger now.

My dad had only a tenuous relationship with punctuality, and most mornings found him racing the clock to the studio. His usual routine was to wake up at 5:00, take a shower, jump in his car, and at 5:45, though sometimes later, roar down the surface streets to Hollywood, his Cadillac hitting speeds of seventy-five miles per hour, to be on the air at 6:05. I never saw my dad drink coffee in the morning. He ran on pure adrenaline. He was writing that day’s show in his head from the moment he opened his eyes.

Jack Chapman would fill the early minutes of the show by playing music. Some mornings listeners might not actually hear my dad’s voice until 6:15. It got a little better when the Ventura Freeway was extended to the West Valley in 1957 and ’58.

My dad did a promotion for his radio show on the Ventura Freeway in the Tarzana area before the freeway was officially opened. He staged an elephant race with jockeys “racing” four elephants eastbound on the new stretch of tarmac between Tarzana and Encino. The press ate it up. Once the freeway finally opened, my dad could get on at Vanalden Avenue, head east at eighty or ninety miles per hour (depending on how late he was) into Hollywood, exit at Gower, and turn right for Sunset Boulevard.

Columbia Square at Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street was an art deco structure that housed historic studios where Jack Benny, Bing Crosby, George Burns, and Edgar Bergen had broadcast their radio shows. KNX Radio and CBS’s TV station, KNXT Channel 2, were the main tenants. Columbia Records had a recording studio in the basement of the building. I knew this was the big time, if only because the lobby of the building had a hot-chocolate machine that provided me with a much-loved treat every morning I went there.

I liked that it was dark outside when we entered the building and light when we left. I felt like I had lived a full day and it was still not even noon. The mornings I went to work with my dad felt like our little secret. It might have been our secret, but since my dad had the number one morning show on Los Angeles radio, it was a secret we shared with half a million other Angelenos.

My dad had the opportunity to meet many of the most popular, influential, and important celebrities of the day as they accepted the invitation to be his special guest during the last hour of his show. Marilyn Monroe, Bob Hope, Jack Lemmon, Charlton Heston, Steve Lawrence, and Eydie Gormé all trouped through his studio.

A thrill for my dad was having Jonathan Winters perform live in his studio. Over the years, Winters appeared on the show twenty-five times. The comedy album was king at the time, and veteran comics like Shelley Berman, Mort Sahl, and Alan King as well as up-and-comers like Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby, and George Carlin would book the show to promote a record, a TV show, a movie, or an appearance at the Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel.

Word got around to publicists, managers, and agents that the
Crane
Show
was an easy, quick, and fun venue with an ever-growing audience for their clients. Generally, the last segment would feature two quite disparate guests like Dick Van Dyke and John Carradine, two very different actors though stars in their own right. My dad enjoyed mining information from each individual and setting up a dynamic between two opposite personalities.

My dad’s television hero was Jack Paar. He loved the often weird combinations of guests from the arts and beyond, and how Paar extracted morsels of knowledge and oddball facts from people you might admire but know nothing about. The guests were at ease because Paar was a conversationalist, not an interviewer, emotional rather than intellectual. My dad identified with Paar, who was an open book on the air, sometimes crying, sometimes sharing with the audience what he did at home and on vacation with his wife and daughter. Paar behaved like a close friend. My dad emulated that behavior, and over the years on his radio show he would tell listeners stories of his home life with my mom. She would get upset, small-town Connecticut kicking in, and say, “Bob, it’s nobody’s business.” But he, like Paar, became an open book on the air. He signed off his show everyday by saying, “Bye, hon.” I always thought (and hoped) that he was talking to my mom, but as the years progressed, I realized he might have been talking to a few other “hons” in the audience as well.

As a kid in Los Angeles hanging around adult professionals, I became aware of my dad’s appreciation of women, particularly actresses. This appreciation was expressed as a hug, a touch on the arm—nothing creepy. The fun-time mood of the radio show carried over to impromptu photo sessions with the guests and my dad. If the guest was Marilyn Monroe or an attractive newcomer like Stefanie Powers, all the better. One time my dad rolled up his pants for an interview he did with a bikini-clad Jayne Mansfield in her pool. After each interview was over, Jack Chapman would produce his Rolleiflex and strobe light and document the event. That’s where I first noticed the touch, the kiss. This was important to me because the woman sharing that touch or kiss with my dad was not my mom. In Connecticut, I was aware of my dad kissing only my mom, his mom, and other female members of our extended family. The women he was kissing in Hollywood he had known only for an hour.

Film and television producers like Jerry Wald listened to my dad’s show on their way in to the studio. They knew Bob Crane’s morning
radio show was a popular place to promote new movies and TV shows. Crane interviewed their stars in a light, easy manner, and besides, they thought he was funny, even wacky at times. Why not throw him a low-risk acting crumb here and there and have their projects talked about on the radio for weeks? So for example, on
The Twilight Zone,
my dad would be cast as the voice of a disc jockey; in
Return to Peyton Place,
he played an Ed McMahon–like talk show sidekick; in
The New Interns
(filmed across the street at Columbia), he played a drunken prankster; and on the
GE Theatre,
he appeared when future president Ronald Reagan was the host of the show.

My dad would walk around studio lots, hoping to run into an agent or producer or, if there was a god, Jack Lemmon or Gig Young. Sometimes I’d accompany him on his studio lot saunters, a cute little kid walking around with his dad. He didn’t see this association as a liability at that time. Being a young, handsome actor with a youngster in tow demonstrated his virility, his being the head of a tribe. But as I got older my presence would reflect the aging process of a struggling actor.

Our happy-go-lucky show business family theme worked for a while. My family appeared in the ubiquitous fan magazines, the goal being to promote the product, Bob Crane. One time my dad, mom, and I performed a well-rehearsed short routine during intermission at the Ice Capades show at the Pan Pacific Auditorium. We also rode in a convertible during the Hollywood Christmas Parade along Hollywood Boulevard with my dad throwing 45-rpm records to the crowd. Mickey Hargitay, who was Mr. Universe as well as Jayne Mansfield’s husband, once taped a week’s worth of his exercise/workout television shows at our house, though I have no idea why.

One of the reasons my dad really admired Jonathan Winters’s career was because Winters was a hyphenate—he did comedy albums, television, movies. My dad wanted a hyphen of his own. He loved radio, but he wanted to be an actor. He wanted to be a radio personality–actor.

His first live acting job was a supporting role in
Who Was That Lady I Saw You With?
at the Valley Playhouse in Woodland Hills across the street from where I would later attend William Howard Taft High School. It was a small theater with only a couple hundred seats. His character made his entrance walking through the tightly packed audience, literally knocking knees with the delighted theatergoers. He loved the instant gratification of live laughter, something he didn’t hear doing radio except when
he cracked up Jack Chapman or the live guests, who were amazed watching a human octopus in action.

The six-week run of
Who Was That Lady?
sold out thanks to my dad’s constant promotion on the air. Most attendees were seeing my dad in the flesh for the first time at that barn in Woodland Hills. Up until that time he was just a zany voice coming from their dashboards. The material was light, my dad was charming, his part was brief. What was not to like? The experience was the equivalent of a delicious but low-calorie dessert.

In those days Dad was often away from home, what with 250 luncheons and dinners a year, a radio show six days a week, a couple of small television and movie roles, a play at night and matinees on the weekend. I was back to being “the little man” Bobby, who spent many hours alone with his mother, the mother who would always serve as the rock of our family. From the house we rented, my mom had walked me back and forth to kindergarten and to local stores along Ventura Boulevard. When we moved to Tarzana, she got a car, a beige Volkswagen bug. She loved that car, and in it we got out a lot more, mother and son, to parks, to movie theaters, to hamburger stands.

I was seven years old, less cute but still full of myself. I was getting cocky, too. I’d done one too many radio appearances. I depended on the same bits, which had become predictable—the bad jokes, the overly self-assured smile that could be cranked up at a moment’s notice for a photo. I knew I was a fraud. I was feeling the early burnout that so many child actors experienced precisely because the one or two or three hooks they depended on were exploited until they were reeled in, bait gone and only an old boot hanging on the barb where an audience should have been. When the kid cast out for more, there was nothing there, just a pedestrian education, a lack of perspective, and a hollowness from the “me, me, me” preening that stage parents and set handlers helped create. While I was not a child star or even a child actor, I had, by virtue of my guest appearances and proximity to my dad’s luminosity, started to take on some of the child star’s foibles. Luckily, I also had the self-awareness to know that my cute days were past their sell-by date, even though it’s tough to realize you’re washed up and still can’t even ride a two-wheeler.

When they made their first home purchase, my parents decided to shake off a bit of East Coast tradition, shed another skin, and move toward becoming full-fledged Angelenos. They decided to build a pool. An honest-to-goodness, precious water–holding, rebar-reinforced, cement-encased,
tile-accented ode to the New California. We were gonna have us a real cement pond, not one of those aboveground plastic tanks. A pool in Southern California is an expression. It’s a way of life. It brings humanity to L.A.

With the construction of our kidney-shaped pool at the Donna Avenue house complete, all that was needed was a mere ten thousand gallons of precious Southwest water. This was an exciting moment in the life of a newly baptized Southern California family. We were talking serious pride of ownership as the water level approached the top step.

The ten-year-old son of our pool contractor was standing on the still-dry step, proud of his father’s work. I was jealous that this kid, this stranger, this son-of-a-contractor was stealing my spotlight. How dare he stand on the top step of our new pool during the inauguration ceremony! I should have been standing there, not that alien. The contractor father stood on the deck at the deep end of the pool. He glanced over in our direction as I stealthily advanced toward his son from behind. When he looked away I gave the unknowing victim a full, two-handed push. Fully
clothed, the boy disappeared into the green, unfiltered water. I looked at the splash zone, then at the father, and lit out for the territories. I headed for my bedroom and went to ground under the bed. My dad, who was in the front yard, heard the splash and the outrage and ran to the backyard. There was gasping and crying and yelling and angry pointing in the direction of my exit stage left.

“Bobby!” yelled my dad.

How could Anne Frank have remained hidden so long? I was disinterred in less than three minutes.

My parents asked me, “Why did you do that?” To this day, I still don’t have a legitimate answer, just fragments of feeling about how that kid was stealing my thunder, replacing me somehow in my own kingdom. I think I can understand a little how Prince Charles must have felt about the public adoration of Princess Diana, albeit on a Tarzana-sized scale.