Up Till Now (26 page)

Basically, it was a game of greed. That’s why it was called
Show Me the Money,
the classic battle cry from the Tom Cruise movie,
Jerry Maguire
. As long ago as
The $64,000 Question
in the 1950s contestants have had to answer the emotional question: take the money and go home or keep playing and risk what you’ve won. That’s the question that gets viewers shouting at the set. Since Monty Hall
introduced the three doors of
Let’s Make a Deal
—which eliminated the question-and-answer segment of the game and made it purely about greed—that has been the central theme of so many really good game shows.
Deal or No Deal
is a show about greed, that’s it, how greedy is the contestant going to be and when are they going to stop. That’s the fascination of the show. The contestant comes on the show with nothing and gets a good sum of money and suddenly the greed factor kicks in. You think, is he crazy? They want to buy a farm. They have enough money to buy the farm—and now they want more than the farm. Howie Mandel is a master at milking that greed; somehow he managed to introduce humanity into a show about greed. That’s what I intended to do, explore the humanity of that greed. I really wanted to ask the intriguing question: How much money is enough?

Admittedly, the rules were a bit confusing. The player picked question A, B, or C and I read the question that was picked but if after hearing it the player chose not to answer it he or she could pick a second letter which he or she also could choose not to answer after I read it, but the player had to answer the third question—but before I revealed if that answer was correct the player selected one of the thirteen gorgeous girls and music started playing and the gorgeous girl started dancing because she was picked and I danced because she was dancing. Have you ever seen me dance? Anyway, the dancer unrolled the scroll she was holding which revealed a certain amount of money and if the answer to the question was correct the contestant had that amount added to his collection but if incorrect it was subtracted from that pot. We continued playing until the player gave six correct answers and won all the money in the pot or had six incorrect answers in which case the player went home with their memories.

That’s clear so far, right? Now, one of the gorgeous girls was holding a scroll that did not indicate an amount of money; instead this was the... “killerrrrrr card!” If the player answered the regular question incorrectly he or she then had to answer the “killerrrrrr card” question, and if they got it wrong the game ended and they
went home with nothing. And then the gorgeous girls danced. But they changed that rule after our first episode so they didn’t have to miss the regular question and then they...

You get the idea, right? Tell a few jokes, give away some money, watch the gorgeous girls dance. I had a lot of fun with it. My job was simple: if the player was comfortable, if he were just soaring along and confident, I was to make him uneasy; but if he were uneasy and nervous, I was to make him comfortable. Additionally, all the cues for music and dancing were up to me. I’d say, “Let’s celebrate,” and the music started playing and the gorgeous girls started dancing, or “Let’s not celebrate” and the gorgeous girls did not dance.

I suggested they put a comedy writer or two in the booth to feed me lines I could ad-lib. No, they decided, that will only get in the way of your rhythm. They were right, the key to the game was the contestant. My job was to find a way for the audience to identify emotionally with the player, to bring out his or her personality. If they rooted for him or her, the game would work.

There were several problems with our show that turned out to be basically unsolvable—unless they changed the rules, in which case it was another show. The biggest failing was that the player didn’t have the option of taking his winnings and leaving, he had to play the game to the end point. We had eliminated the greed factor, the player had to continue. Second, the rules were too complicated. The best game shows or quiz shows are the simplest. Too much was happening, and then the gorgeous girls danced. Personally, it was much harder to do than I had anticipated. We were taping over the weekend. Theoretically you should be able to tape an hour show in an hour. So if we were taping two shows it would take—with all the changes that had to be done—three hours, four hours.

Oh, more nice news. I just made a new friend on MySpace. Welcome to my page, the Mad Mountain Man of Montana.

So, taping: because this was a new show and everything was computerized, all my cues and the questions had to be programmed into the teleprompter. It took twelve hours to do two shows. We ended up
working all weekend and I was on my feet much of that time. Man can only dance so long. By Monday morning when I went to work on
Boston Legal,
I was exhausted.

When the show was canceled after a brief run people were very sympathetic. Everyone acted as if there had been a death in my career. It even occurred to me that perhaps we should sit shiva for the show, and then we could have my characters from
The Shiva Club
come and tell some jokes and cheer up everyone—then sell the rights as a special.

But honestly, I was not unhappy it was canceled. Much earlier in my career when a show was canceled or finished its run, I always experienced some anxiety as the actor’s what’s-next-is-my-career-over factor kicked in. Obviously I don’t feel that way anymore. I can always get a gig singing at science-fiction award shows.

When we were making
Star Trek
Leonard in particular was concerned about being typecast. As he remembers, “People were actually asking me, ‘What are you going to do when this is over?’ I wondered if I was missing something. I guess I should have been worried, but I wasn’t. I wanted the credit for creating this character.” Well, as it turned out neither Leonard nor I were typecast, it was much deeper than that. We were branded forever as Kirk and Spock and certainly for me that turned out to be wonderful. But after making the original series, the animated series, and the first motion picture, and after all the different kind of work I’d done, I wondered if I would ever escape that association. I’d made several failed attempts, including
Barbary Coast,
but in the collective mind of the audience I was the captain of the
Enterprise.
Finally, though, it was time to turn the page on Captain James T. Kirk.

“T.J. Hooker
is the name, but you don’t have to lose any sleep wondering what the T.J. is for. As far as you’re concerned my name is . . . Sergeant . . .” That was my opening line in the pilot movie we shot for the police series
T.J. Hooker.
In this establishing scene Hooker is addressing a squad of future police officers about to get onthe-street training. “There’s a war going on out there on our streets,” he continued. “People are scared and they have a right to be. The body count is high . . . Street-savvy hoods have no fear. Not of the courts, not of prison.

“When a bust does stick, we house them, give them color TVs, and their wives visit on weekends. If that makes sense to you, then you and I are about to have a problem ‘cause I’m your instructor here and I lovvvvve to weed out airheads and marshmallows.”

Later in that show Hooker tells his recruits, “I’ve seen the past. And it works,” which pretty much describes the character I played for five years—which was actually much longer than I played James

T. Kirk on television. Hooker was a veteran cop who’d quit the detective squad to get back on the streets after his partner was killed. He was a Vietnam vet, a former Green Beret, a divorced father whose wife had left him—even though she still loves him—because she couldn’t accept his dedication to the badge, explaining, “When I divorced you I should have named the department as co-respondent.”

In response he began drinking. “There I was with no wife, no kids, I needed a friend and I found one.”

When I brought T.J. Hooker to life I focused on the one word that I thought best described him: angry. Angry about the laws that made his job tougher. Angry about the Miranda rights for suspects. Angry about all the rules instituted by do-gooders who didn’t understand life on the streets. He had to comply, but he was angry about it. Hooker was a conservative cop placed in a liberal setting, and at its best we were able to successfully represent that conflict. Had I met Hooker I would have liked him; he had a good heart, strong ethics, and even when he disagreed with the law he always upheld it.

The way
Hooker
came about was unusual. Most series are in development for several years before they get rejected. Even if a pilot gets made, only a few of them ever get on the air. But in the early 1980s legendary producers Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg were ending their partnership and still had a guaranteed commitment for one more show from ABC. They hired a top TV writer-director, Rick Husky, to create the show and write the pilot. It took him only a few weeks, he remembers. The biggest problem he had was coming up with a name for the character. He was a Civil War buff so he called him Hooker after General Hooker. He couldn’t come up with a first name that felt right, so he called him T.J. because
“It was better than no first name.” Only much later did I become Thomas Jefferson Hooker.

Within a couple of months we were making the pilot. That’s how fast it happened. Initially the show wasn’t supposed to be
T.J. Hooker.
It was an ensemble show called
The Protectors,
featuring a grizzled police sergeant and the group of eight young cops he’s training. According to Rick Husky, it was supposed to be
Dallas,
with cops. Each week another one of those cops would be featured. One of the reasons I took the part, in fact, was because I wouldn’t have all the pressure of starring in a series. Most weeks I’d just be a supporting player. But the response to my character was so strong they dropped that premise and focused on Hooker. They did not, however, raise my salary.

The show was an immediate hit.
The New York Times
called Hooker “the kind of character who would have been unthinkable for television just a couple of years ago...T.J. Hooker is a fascinating creation.” But I knew we’d struck a chord even without reading that review. We used to film on the streets of Los Angeles, we’d have all our production trailers parked in a row, and before the show went on the air people would stop to watch and they’d point me out and I’d hear them say, “Oh, there’s Captain Kirk.” The night after the show went on the air, literally the night after, I heard people saying, “Oh, look, there’s T.J. Hooker.”

Hooker was an interesting character. He was a tough, conservative Los Angeles cop forced to deal with the new rules of a changing society, things like Miranda laws and understanding the root causes of crime, and didn’t like it at all. When he joined the force the rules had been pretty straightforward; the good guys take the bad guy into the back of the station until he confesses. Instead, as he says sadly, “There’s a war going on out there in the streets and, from where I stand, the bad guys are winning.”

You know how much fun it is to play a character like this? What made Hooker’s character so interesting to me was that he remembered the old rules of law enforcement: of course I understand you robbed that bank because you have no self-esteem. Boom, taste my
nightstick. Yes, I know your addiction is a disease and you couldn’t help mugging that person. Boom, say hello to my nightstick. But Hooker had to do his job under the new rules—and chafed at it like a stallion with a bit in his mouth.

And it wasn’t just modern law enforcement, it was modern life. Hooker was always railing against “parents that don’t care, kids that lack discipline,” against gambling and a permissive society. As his partner Romano described him, “Hooker’s just a little backward. He’s not used to dealing with modern women.”

I rarely had time to do any research for the parts I played. For Kirk, who was I going to talk to? For
Incubus,
I couldn’t understand anybody. Well, perhaps I did research modern women. But before we started filming
Hooker
I did spend two days with LAPD officers from the North Hollywood station to try to get some ideas about their procedures. For example, a captain showed me how to pat down a perp. They made me lean against a wall at a forty-five-degree angle, arms outstretched, legs spread wide. Standing in that position, I asked, “What happens if I resist at this point?”

That’s when the captain, standing behind me, rammed his knee into my crotch. He explained, “They may get a little loud, but by this time most of them cooperate.”

Stars were twinkling in my eyes as another officer added, “His whole life is flashing before his eyes.”

“Yeah,” I squeaked, remembering suddenly why I didn’t do research. Eventually the cast included Adrian Zmed as my young hot-headed partner, James Darren as another veteran cop, and Heather Locklear played his partner, a female street cop who often worked underclothed...undercover. Actually, I think the most difficult problem faced by the writers each week was creating another plot that forced Heather Locklear to take off most of her clothes. Until I did this show I can honestly say I did not know how many criminals hung out at female mud-wrestling emporiums or how many stool pigeons insisted on meeting in the privacy of a strip club.

Heather Locklear joined the cast for the second season. The producers had decided to add a beautiful woman to the cast to attract a
very specific demographic group: every man in the world. Rick Husky was looking out his office window one afternoon when this gorgeous blonde came out of Aaron Spelling’s office and walked by. He immediately went into Spelling’s office to find out who she was. “That’s the girl I want for
Hooker,
” he told Spelling.

Spelling shook his head. “No, you don’t,” Spelling said. “She can’t act. We just had her on a
Matt Houston
and she just doesn’t have it.”

Rick Husky had seen her walking. He knew she had it. “That’s who I want.” Spelling tried to talk him out of it, but Husky insisted and Heather Locklear joined our cast. She was a sweet, nice, and beautiful young woman, who worked very hard to become a good actress. So good, in fact, and so popular that several months later Aaron Spelling added her to the cast of his new show
Dynasty
.

For several years she was working simultaneously in two hit series. That must have been some walk. Only once was there any kind of problem with Heather. On several shows Heather did not wear a bra. Finally, one of the top executives told Ken Koch, an associate producer who eventually directed several episodes, that he had to go down to the set and tell Heather that she was going to have to start wearing a bra. Koch had been in the army, when he got an order he followed it—although admittedly he’d never been given an order like this in the army. But he went to the set and took her aside to explain, “You know, in your profile shots, you’re not looking like, you know, the Heather Locklear that everybody wants to see and the beautiful woman you really are.”

I believe Heather was taken aback. And so she asked Ken in a soft voice, “Are you going to speak to Bill and Jimmy and have them stuff socks in their crotch so it makes them look like they’ve got big dicks?”

Ken admitted he hadn’t thought about that. About a week later we were shooting the tag, the last scene after the bad guys have been caught, at Marina del Rey. When we finished we were all walking toward the camera. It was a good shot. When they cut Heather kept walking, right up to Ken Koch, and she told him with a big smile, “You know, didn’t Bill’s dick look bigger?”

We had a really good cast and crew. I really bonded with both Adrian Zmed and Jimmy Darren. That was important, because we spent a lot of time locked up together in a cop car. Jimmy Darren, I remember, was afraid of birds. All types of birds. As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, as soon as we found out about that we were all very sympathetic. The writers, for example, immediately started adding action scenes that took place on rooftops. We’d be running across the rooftops of Los Angeles in the middle of the summer. Nothing stopped Jimmy—except a pigeon. A single, unarmed... unwinged pigeon was enough to make him pause. As soon as he saw a pigeon he’d start to cower. He’d been jumping from rooftop to rooftop, tackling bad actors, doing whatever stunts were necessary, until he confronted...a pigeon.

Birds? Who could be afraid of birds? Now heights, that’s a real fear. Hooker wasn’t afraid of anything, Shatner hated heights. Even building roofs, so between Jimmy Darren and me those writers worked overtime to get us up on roofs.

Adrian Zmed had a lot of talent. In addition to being a good actor, he could sing and dance. He also had a terrific sense of humor. Many of our shows ended with me chasing the bad guy by myself and bringing him down, then seconds later Adrian would come running up to me. I’d tell him, “Get an ambulance, Junior.”

So one night we were filming this climactic scene and I chased the perp down an alley and brought him down. Heeerrrrrrrrre comes Adrian. Breathlessly, I told him, “Get an ambulance, Junior.”

Adrian looked at me and shook his head. “Why don’t you get your own damn ambulance,” he said, then turned around and walked out of the shot.

Well. That certainly was interesting. I was truly surprised. There was absolute silence on the set—until Ken Koch started laughing and then I realized I’d been set up. And started laughing.

Each episode adhered to a pretty strict formula: really bad guys, beautiful women, and plenty of action. Our criminals were always total “skels,” or as Hooker described them, maggots, scavengers, vermin, creeps and scum, slimy, unctuous killers and rapists, really
unpleasant human beings, men so completely lacking any redeeming qualities that in one episode they actually cut off the head of a teddy bear belonging to a teenaged prostitute trying to go straight—so whatever Hooker had to do to get them off the streets was acceptable. Each week Hooker faced some sort of dilemma: Should I inform on a cop who froze at the last minute to save a pregnant woman? Did a female cop I trained get shot and lose her leg because I didn’t train her well enough? There was always some sort of humorous by-play between Adrian and myself that continued through the whole episode; Adrian gets a brand-new computer to pick the winners of horse races, Adrian is going to show me how to use modern sales techniques to sell my daughter’s organization cookies. At some point in many episodes I ended up at Valley Hospital. Usually a colorful informer provided information that led me to the bad guy, anybody from a Rasta conga player to a blind news dealer to a friendly pawnshop owner. On the path to justice I always encountered a beautiful woman, from the prostitute with a heart of fifty-dollar bills, to my ex-wife, to a beach filled with bikini-clad girls, to the daughter of the victim, to the female cop who invited me to her place to “show him her calculator.” To gain more information either Heather had to take off some clothes or Adrian and I had to visit a place where women were taking off some clothes. There was always a lot of action, we tried to include three action sequences in each episode, and almost always ended with a chase scene. And we concluded with a humorous tag: the horse I picked by guessing number four beat the horse selected by his computer, my daughter wins the award for selling the most cookies—which I sold to all the people in the precinct who were going to show me how to sell cookies.

I once asked a detective who’d seen the show if he thought it accurately reflected reality. He smiled and said, “You guys can cram more police work into an hour than I do in a year... Some days I go all day without a call.” Well, that wouldn’t make a very interesting show, Hooker and Romano sitting in their police car eating donuts. What do you want to do today, Vince? I don’t know, Hooker, what do you want to do?
T.J. Hooker
was an action show. There was at
least one chase scene in every episode, either I chased a bad guy on foot or in our car or both. On foot I’d somehow manage to keep pace with the bad guy. Even though I was wearing my uniform and carrying all my equipment, inevitably I’d have to jump over a chain-link fence or a brick wall or climb a ladder onto a roof, roll over the hood of a car, then make a leaping tackle, after which the perp and I would roll down a slope or near the edge of the roof, but almost always I caught him and cuffed him. And without losing my breath. In the car, it seemed like every time Adrian and I got a call to rush to a location where a crime was taking place we happened to be going in the opposite direction, because we always ended up doing a squealing U-turn in the middle of the block. Generally our criminals were terrible drivers; for special effects we drove cars off buildings, we drove them into lakes, we drove them through fires, and we crashed them, so clearly there was a budgetary reason our perps drove terribly beat-up cars. Every few shows we had a tremendous explosion; we blew up a lot of cars in five seasons, we blew up a yacht—once we even had a getaway car crash into a gasoline tanker to give us two great explosions. Unfortunately the special-effects people put a little too much gasoline in the tanker and it exploded in a cloud of flame that went right over the heads of the sound crew. Dangerous as can be—but it looked wonderful on film. After that the philosophy of the special-effects people became, why use only one gallon of gas when you can blow up ten!