I admit it: I watched too damned much television when I was a kid.
I loved television, loved it; was captivated, enthralled, enduring everything else— school, parents, homework, parents, dinner hour, parents, chores, pet needs and parents— to live for and through my favorite TV shows. And not just my favorites— TV generally. If I could have crawled into the television set and magically zapped myself into that glamorous-seeming, faraway parallel universe—like Jeannie, like Samantha Stevens—I would have, never to return. And if you’d been there you’d have shaken your head in dismazement— technically not a word but it sounds stronger somehow than “dismayed amazement”— at the lazy spectacle of the middle-school me, sprawled and slack jawed before the holy temple that was our Zenith color console, my drug both of circumstance and choice.
I know. I should have gotten out more, joined a theatre group, an after school book club, run away with a traveling circus— anything to get my pre- and post- adolescent eyeballs unglued from the television screen. And I’m sure it’s not at all significant that as I’m typing this I’m twisting and turning in my chair, the better to catch every minute of the manically funny Kathy Griffin’s deadpan pronouncements on the innumerable absurdities of modern celebrity on this Bravo channel
My Life on the D-List marathon…
What puts me in mind of all this is that yesterday, while rooting through an old file box, I came across a loooong letter I’d written to a friend (Aw, crap! Did I not mail this thing? Or is this a copy or what?) some— whoa— some six years ago, probably on the job when I was supposed to have been doing my “real” work, and apparently in reference to an email I’d sent earlier that very day (according to the letter) to the TV Land channel’s Question and Answer Guy, “Postmaster Steve.”
There it was, all eighteen pages of it (Hey, I said it was long…) and attached to the back, a copy of that “Postmaster Steve” email as well. I looked that over, first.
It was a way shorter read, a bit snide but in an entertaining kind of way, at least to me. I’ve no idea what “Postmaster Steve” thought of it since—it’s all coming back now— I never received a response from him. (Fine, Steve. If that’s the way you want to be about it.)
I confess gang, I still watch too much TV and nearly as indiscriminately, though I seldom bother with the TV Land channel any longer for the thrill, as the great B.B. King once said, is gone— the thrill is gone away. After a splashy, truly exciting beginning— to an inveterate couch potato like me, I mean— the perhaps inevitable happened: TV Land became boring, predictable, and, like so much else about television these days, downright irritating.
It was not always thus. One magical evening, somewhere back in the late nineties, the Nickelodeon channel, known in the PM as “Nick-At-Nite”, suspended its regular schedule to offer an evening-long sampling of “Boomer programming” as part of the promotional launch for a new cable channel called TV Land.
And I was dazzled, my dears, I was launched into Couch Potato Heaven! For there they were! All the fondly half-remembered silly sitcoms, excitingly improbable action-adventures and corny-poignant melodramas of childhood and adolescent yesteryear, back in pristine high-def color or sparkling black and white:
Honey West and
Peter Gunn;
The Loves of Dobie Gillis and
Room 222;
Alfred Hitchcock Presents and
The Outer Limits;
I Spy and
The Bill Cosby Show;
The Real McCoys and
The Mothers-In-Law;
Hazel,
Mannix,
Gidget,
That Girl,
The Banana Splits and
The Monkees, My World And Welcome To It, and, I know you all remember it,
My Mother the Car. (Yeah, I know— the television exec who green-lighted that one must have been tripping, but bits of it were funny and the perpetually befuddled Jerry Van Dyke— younger brother of boomer legend Dick— had a certain goofy charm, especially for an undiscriminating nine-year old.)
I was so happy, my dears. They were back! They came back! And to keep them close to me, I had only to call my local cable provider and say the Magic Words:
MISTER (OR MISS) CABLE PROVIDER, TAKE ME! TAKE ME NOW! TAKE ME TO TV LAND!!
And so I did, my dears, I did!
And then… all my happy TV dreams went to shit...
What happened, you ask? Long bitter story short, what happened was that when I called my cable provider I discovered that they could not provide the cable I wanted, because… well, that’s where it gets a bit murky.
“We can’t offer TV Land,” my bored-out-of-her-mind-sounding local cable customer service rep semi-patiently explained. Her voice had a faintly nasal quality, and in my mind’s eye I saw the pinched, pursed visage of Lily Tomlin’s comically persnickety telephone operator. (“One ring-y ding-y, two ring-y ding-ys… A gracious hello…”)
“What?” I stammered, taken aback. “I’m sorry; did you—did you say—“
“We can’t offer the TV Land channel, Miss M, because we don’t have it,” she repeated, her boredom flipping over to annoyance. (She was annoyed with me? Excuse me?)
“What do you mean you don’t have it? I huffed frostily. (Two can play the annoyance game, Miss Nasally Customer Service-Telephone Operator.) “Why??”
Silence. Then she sighed, like she’d been having this conversation all day and was getting good and sick of it. “Chicago Cable has a lock on TV Land and we can’t get it,” she replied flatly.
Full Disclosure: Miss Nasally Customer Service-Telephone Operator didn’t actually say “Chicago Cable” because by that point the cable giant had been re-christened with some other name I no longer recall, but that was the gist of her rather snippy explanation.
Chicago Cable, or whatever name they were then known by, were doing something that I gathered was not strictly kosher— they were, for all intents and purposes, monopolizing the new channel, or something to that effect, and appeared to be daring their smaller competitors to do anything about it, not that my local cable company seemed all that interested in making the effort.
I was furious, especially when Miss NCS-TO readily acknowledged that Chicago Cable’s actions were certainly unethical and possibly illegal, but, she said, if customers wanted the new TV Land channel pried out of the—here I’m paraphrasing, slightly—grasping, soulless, gi-normously greedy jaws of that Godless Corporate Behemoth known as Chicago Cable they’d have to do it themselves. Call the Cable Commission or the FCC and complain. Start a petition or something; whatever. Then, upon learning there was no further way she could serve me today, she gave me what I took to be the by-the-handbook sign-off, delivered in a tone of total disinterest:
Thank you for calling (Your Local Cable Provider), and have a blessed day!...To shit.
Shit!
So, no TV Land for me, not then, and not for a long time. Not until several years later, when I moved from Hyde Park into a Bronzeville apartment and upon doing so discovered that my local cable provider was now— yes, you guessed it— the Godless Behemoth itself, Chicago Cable, re-re-christened as AT&T Something-or-other.
But, you know, whatever. It’s cool. Better late than never, right? It took awhile to get there, but finally, finally, I’d arrived, Dorothy in the Emerald City. I’d arranged for my cable service to be installed on the very evening of my move into my new place, and I was so excited I almost didn’t care that the movers took my furniture to the wrong address and that Lizzie, my cat, who now hated my guts for all the noise, confusion and strange new smells, had made herself an angry, grumbling, furry little ball of bitter resentment in the linen closet, refusing to come out for food, water or catnip.
As for me--phone; heat; a chair— all of that could wait, for the Cable Guy was coming and bringing with him my new digital box and remote, and with them, through them, my ticket to Nirvana, to Valhalla, to TV LAND!
As he completed the installation, I nearly wept with joy when he turned to me and said (in a tone of total disinterest) “Sign here please… and here… and initial right there.”
Then, alone at last (except for the hissing, pissed-off cat), I sank into the cushiony comfort of my Pier One loveseat and with trembling fingers picked up my shiny new remote and flipped to channel 163. There it was, my dears— at last, at last!— the fabled TV Land!
Except…
Except something was different, somewhere. The TV Land landscape had changed.
Oh, it was Oz, alright, but somehow not as gleaming, not as glittering as I’d expected. Indeed as I scanned the channel menu, my heart began slowly to sink. For the program line-up was respectable, yes, but not as spectacular as I’d anticipated given that sparkling Nick-At-Nite introduction.
Room 222 was gone, and with it its staff, the handsome, annoying know-it-all Pete Dixon, the lovely Liz McIntyre, the eager, wide-eyed Alice Johnson and the long-suffering, wise-cracking Mr. Kaufman.
Dobie Gillis was gone and with him his beatnik buddy, the antic Maynard G. Krebs.
Honey West—the lovely, luminous Anne Francis (remember her from that
Twilight Zone episode? The bewildered department store mannequin come to life?)— gone. Nearly all the TV treasure, the classics and near-classics that I’d glimpsed on that long-ago inaugural evening, was long gone. And the programming that remained had slowly devolved into the likes of
The Andy Griffith Show,
The Jeffersons, I Love Lucy and
Good Times.Shit.
Understand, I didn’t and don’t dislike those TV shows, generally the opposite, though frankly a little of Deputy Barney Fife’s goggle-eyed apoplexy, George Jefferson’s bantam rooster arrogance, Lucy’s shrill laments of “Rick-eee!” and J.J.’s “DYNO-
MITE!!” goes a long way with me. But those particular shows were no longer special; being in continual syndication, they could be seen on other channels on almost any day of the week. Meanwhile, just as I was looking forward to getting happily reacquainted with them, most of whatever was left of the long-lost, seldom-seen gems of yesteryear were either being shown at hours that placed them frustratingly out of reach—my VCR was broken and my perpetual cash-flow issues wouldn’t allow the immediate purchase of a new one—or they’d already disappeared back into the broadcast ether.
And I don’t know about you, but I came to deplore TV Land’s programming gimmick of weekend long, back-to-back-to-back episodes of just one TV show, because it devoured air time that could have been given to other fare I’d hoped to see again—sprawling series westerns like
Wagon Train and
The Virginian, or absurdly self-serious morality plays like
Adam-12, Dragnet, and
The F.B.I (all of those, coincidentally, old standbys of Grandma’s).
Like nearly everyone else these days, TV Land now seems more invested in (sigh) reality programming featuring celebs willing to look foolish or worse to stay in or as close to the spotlight as they can get, “event” programming such as the annual TV Land Awards which, annually, is broadcast over and over and over again until you're sent screaming from the room, or the occasional movie showcasing career-best performances chopped to ruinous, incomprehensible pieces by constant commercials and those animated, irritatingly intrusive, station identification breaks— the 1975 Sally Fields-Joanne Woodward tour de force
Sybil comes immediately to mind.
Ah, well. It was nice while it lasted. I guess.
Wonder of wonders, there are a handful of old shows I’m currently re-enjoying, or enjoying for the very first time, courtesy of Me-TV, another cable torch bearer of nostalgia programming.
What a pleasure indeed to finally see Blake Edwards’s noir-ish
Peter Gunn, featuring that terrific Henry Mancini jazz theme and starring the suave Craig Stevens and that svelte, stylish Lola Albright, who definitely had something, but not enough of it to launch her into A-list stardom;
Sergeant Bilko aka
The Phil Silvers Show, starring that scheming Confidence Trickster Supreme, Ernie Bilko aka Phil Silvers (Howahya! Glaaad to see ya!); the sly western spoof,
Maverick, starring the tall, dark and rascally handsome James Garner, without whose easy-going charm both the movies and series television would have been much the poorer; and
The Jack Benny Program, starring that incomparable skinflint and master of deadpan timing:
Hold-Up Man (brandishing a gun): Stick ‘em up! Your money or your life!
(Jack Benny stares at him, dismayed.)
Pause. (The studio audience titters.)
Pause. (The laughter begins to build)
Hold-Up Man (menacing): I said your money or your life!
Pause. (The audience is roaring as Jack continues to just stand there.)
Hold-Up Man (agitated): Well??!!
Jack Benny (exasperated):
I’m thinking it over!!And of course a big part of the fun of watching classic shows from the fifties, sixties and early seventies is the chance to see now-veteran actors working it in their struggling salad days, as well as established stars of the day in change-of-pace guest shots. Like Mr. Entertainment and Rat Pack hipster Sammy Davis, Jr., nailing it as a brooding gunslinger named Tip Corey on
The Rifleman, circa 1962;
lanky Clint Eastwood, at the beginning of his
Rawhide first fame, appearing as a surly young tough whom the wily Garner teaches a lesson in a 1959 episode of
Maverick;
a radiant Cicely Tyson—some of you may remember her as Jane Foster, NYC social worker George C. Scott’s devoted secretary, in 1963’s acclaimed but short-lived social drama
East Side/West Side (Did you catch it as one of the “Brilliant But Canceled” series offerings on the Trio channel, I mean, when Trio was a channel? Me neither, dammit)— and as an African princess in the exceptional 1965
I Spy outing “So Long, Patrick Henry” (which boasted a strong performance as well from the excellent Ivan Dixon);
insult comic Don Rickles as lovable loser “Lyle Delp” on a 1964
Dick Van Dyke Show two-parter (“4& ½” and “The Alan Brady Show Goes To Jail”);
and a startlingly young Harrison Ford as a sullen, mixed-up youth rescued from a life of crime by wooden-faced Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. on
The F.B.I. in 1967.
There’s more, much more I’d like a chance to see again, some of it television that in my callow youth I’d dismissed— disdained even— but have since developed an abiding affection for because I now get references that were over my head back then, or the episodes contain performances that intrigue me now, but mostly because these were TV shows my family loved, and I loved my family. Maybe that’s the key to the enduring appeal of classic television, maybe that’s the whole thing— how it can reconnect us, in small yet visceral ways, to people we loved most who knew us best, especially those who are no longer with us now.
I mean, as a kid I never cared all that much for westerns, with the possible exception of
Bonanza, which wasn’t then so much a “western”, exactly, as simply one of our not to be missed
Sunday Night Stories, that and
The Ed Sullivan Show and, on Saturdays (then and now the best day of the week),
The Jackie Gleason Show,
The Hollywood Palace and
Saturday Night at the Movies. It was television my family gathered together to brood over, laugh at or sing along with, dessert plates firmly in hand and not a remote in sight.
Now whenever I hear the triumphant opening themes of
The High Chaparral,
The Big Valley or
The Cimarron Strip there’s my Grandma in her softly faded pastel housecoat and matching pink slippers perching perilously close to the edge of the sofa, her chin on her fist, one elbow balancing on one bony knee, practically leaning into and through the television set; dreamy, murmuring, totally engrossed. My remembered childhood was the sound of her exclaiming disgustedly, berating the players their foolishness, wickedness and greed. Then eventually, a knowing chuckle, a hum of pleasure, and a smile of serene satisfaction when justice triumphed, as in those days it always did, in the end.
That may be my last, most enduring memory of her, this fastidiously tidy little lady with the sharp tongue and the sheepish laugh, contentedly watching her favorite “stories.”
Then there was Joe—for a time, the Brooksian silliness of
Get Smart! and the arch camp of
Batman were appointment television for my younger brother Joey; he also really liked
Time Tunnel,
Lost in Space and any grainy episodes of
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea he could find on the then 7-channel dial; personally I thought
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was really lame, and only the memory of my brief but intense infatuation with Gary Conway and
Land of the Giants prevents me from sneering. I was also a sucker for
Johnny Quest,
Josie and the Pussycats, and the Frazier Thomas kiddie show
Garfield Goose and Friends and the sweetly sentimental
Family Classics.And our mom used to roll her eyes at this one— which secretly annoyed me; I knew she and Grandma never missed an episode of Peyton Place so what made
her so superior?— but I loved
Here Come the Brides and so, come to think of it, did my grandmother, though not necessarily for the same reasons.
Brides was not really a western at all but an adventure series; it debuted in September 1968.
Here Come the Brides featured yet another rousing, memorable theme, an abbreviated instrumental of the song “Seattle,” which, I know you all recall, was a innocuously pleasant middle-of-the-road hit for Perry Como. I know this because WMAQ, then a major Windy City easy listening radio station and Grandma’s abiding listening preference, played the Como version con-stant-ly.
Do you remember
Here Come the Brides? It was set in the late 1800s and starred Robert Brown, David Soul and teen idol Bobby Sherman as the three Bolt brothers, Jason, Joshua and Jeremy, respectively. The Bolts were a proud and close family of hunky orphaned Seattle loggers who jointly owned Bridal Veil Mountain and often clashed at least once per episode but, in the manner of sixties and seventies episodic television, always resolved their differences by the closing theme, strolling off into the sunset with arms thrown fraternally around one another’s broad shoulders, an ending which always made my grandmother smile. She didn’t care much for what she witheringly called “mushy stuff” but was all for family solidarity.
And when the Bolt brothers weren’t in conflict with each other they were united against the town’s wealthy semi-villain, Aaron Stempel, played with just the right touch of sneering gravitas by Mark Lenard, who (Trivia Alert #1) may actually be better known for his appearances on the original
Star Trek as Mr. Spock’s impassive Vulcan dad, Sarek— but we don’t really care about that, so let’s move on.
Bobby Sherman’s cuddly Jeremy Bolt was a short, shy, sensitive stutterer (try saying that three times fast) and was head over boot heels in love with the upright and rather highly strung Candy Pruitt (Bridget Hanley), the leader of the Brides. Jeremy was forever on the verge of proposing to Candy, which come to think of it would have made her an actual bride except that it never happened. In the wake of the show’s success Sherman’s pop music career took off—at least I think that was the sequence—and his cheesy, prefabricated bubblegum hits, “Easy Come, Easy Go,” “(Hey!) Little Woman,” “Julie, Julie, Julie, Do Ya Love Me” and the like, dominated AM radio for a time.
And yes, I have the record album; it’s called “Bobby Sherman’s Greatest Hits” and it’s on the shelf next to my David Cassidy “Cherish” album. And shut up.
Here Come the Brides ended in 1970, and Bobby Sherman did a guest shot— it may have been a two-parter— on an episode of
The Partridge Family. Personally, I adored
The Partridge Family and used to entertain my best friend Mike with what he swore was a spot-on Shirley Partridge-playing-the-keyboards-and-singing-lustily-at-the-top-of-her-lungs impersonation— and we’ll just pause here to let you all snicker at the very thought of that.
I eagerly collected nearly all the Partridge Family albums though I knew damn well that the only cast members singing on any of them were Mrs. Partridge aka Shirley Jones (She of
Oklahoma!, Carousel and
Elmer Gantry movie fame) and oldest son Keith, or rather her real-life stepson David Cassidy, son of the late Jack Cassidy, a big Broadway star of the fifties and early sixties.
Jack Cassidy was one of the most enjoyably spiteful and withering personalities ever to grace the small screen, and though he’d make memorable guest appearances on TV staples like
Bewitched,
Columbo,
Mission Impossible and
Hawaii Five-0, his series claim to fame was as co-star of
He & She, the 1967 sitcom that is said to be the forerunner of the witty and sophisticated MTM shows of seventies television— but more about that later.
The pajama-clad Partridge Family, roused early one morning by the sound of groovy music coming from their garage, discover Bobby Sherman, stylishly decked out in a choker, striped shirt and bell bottoms, playing a sprightly instrumental on Shirley’s keyboard, backed by a tape of himself playing all the other instruments, including the tambourine.
And this next part is what I so love about sixties and seventies series television.
Rather than backing swiftly away at the sight of a complete stranger making himself at home on her property and screaming for the police, Shirley Partridge tosses aside all thoughts of her own and her children’s safety and invites the shaggy-haired intruder into the kitchen for scrambled eggs, bacon and a cup of coffee, since, you know, they’re up now and breakfast
is the most important meal of the day. This actually made sense to me, when I was thirteen.
And that appearance did what it was meant to do: it spun Bobby Sherman into a (short-lived) series of his own,
Getting Together, in which he co-starred with a dark-haired, Dondi-eyed actor named Wes Stern who played the goodhearted bumbler to Sherman’s nurturing, heartthrob, older brother-type, the ying to Sherman’s yang, the id to Sherman’s superego, or something like that.
The two were cast as songwriting partners who were either trying to break into the big time selling their songs, or trying to break into the big time singing their songs, or both, a la real life singing-songwriting partners Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, upon whom the series was, everyone said at the time, absolutely not based.
And to dispel any nasty suspicions out there in flyover country about a show featuring two attractive young guys setting up household together in L.A., the producers decided to give Sherman a cute preadolescent daughter named Jenny, except that Jenny’s mom, tragically and conveniently, was deceased, and like the Partridge Family dad no mention was made of her, at any time, ever— which in both cases should have been a downer but apparently not.
Also like
The Partridge Family, Sherman found occasion in each episode to sing a bouncy, bubblegum song or two, and subsequently a couple of albums featuring the songs were released on the ABC-Dunhill label— or, no, I think it was Bell Records… yes, it’s all coming back now; it definitely was Bell Records and Tapes, because Bell had that distinctive silver and black label, remember?
And yes to your nosy little question.
Ah, showbiz. Thanks to shows like
Getting Together— Sherman sang the theme, by the way, bits and pieces of which, though I swear I’m not doing it on purpose, I’m remembering as I type this— and pop songs like “La, La La La, La La La, La-La-La-La (If I Had You)” Bobby Sherman is now a Northern California volunteer fireman (or was, a few years back). Need I say more?
As for the wide-eyed, sweet-faced Mr. Stern, beyond a couple of appearances on the laugh track-ridden ABC-TV anthology series
Love, American Style, I have no idea what happened to him following the cancellation of
Getting Together and—be honest now— do you really care? By the way, the bouncy
Love, American Style theme was sung by The Cowsills, the real-life pop-singing family upon whom
The Partridge Family was (loosely) based.
But I digress, again.
David Soul’s Joshua was the tall, blonde, middle Bolt brother— I know we’ve drifted a bit, but technically we’re still talking about
Here Come the Brides— with the head for numbers who kept the family business books. Josh also had a fierce temper and every other episode or so would find a reason to square off against big brother Jason, compelling little brother Jeremy to (sometime literally) insert himself between the two, doing his darndest to keep the peace; still, the strong-willed Bolts were often at loggerheads.
Loggerheads! Get it?
(Oh, come on, that was
funny! Besides, if I hadn’t said it, eventually you would have!)
Soul seemed to have better luck career-wise than both his former
Brides co-stars, staying busy with lots of series guest appearances and roles in various TV movies. Following a career boost as a corrupt cop in 1973’s
Magnum Force, Clint Eastwood’s
Dirty Harry sequel, David Soul went from whichever banana he’d been in
Here Come the Brides to co-banana as one of a pair of wiseacre “super-cops” in the popular mid-seventies TV actioner,
Starsky and Hutch, another favorite of my grandmother’s but not of mine, particularly— as a rule I didn’t much care for what I saw as the empty platitudes and fascist escapism of seventies cop shows (
S.W.A.T., anyone?) preferring instead the ambiguities and gritty social realism of sixties offerings like the
Naked City TV series (which actually debuted in 1958), and I’d pay good money to see at least one complete season of
N.Y.P.D., the 1967-69 cop show starring Jack Warden, Robert Hooks and Frank Converse, just to see how it holds up.
Like Bobby Sherman before him, Soul even recorded several successful record albums, one of which yielded the chart-topping pop ballad
, "Don’t Give Up On Us"
, though his career could not have been helped by emerging tabloid reports of arrests for assault and battery and rumored drug problems.
Significantly then, David Soul starred in the disturbing
Rage!, a 1980 TV-Movie of the Week in which he very convincingly portrayed an incarcerated rapist trying, with the help of wizened veteran actor James Whitmore and the hulking Craig T. Nelson (
Coach;
The District), to come to terms with his demons— an acting performance allegedly mandated by a real-life California judge as an alternative to real-life jail time for real-life spousal abuse. I have no idea what David Soul is doing right now but if he’s in the same emotional place as thirty years ago, I’d be willing to bet it involves rehab.
Ah, and then there was Robert Brown, the brawny, masculine ideal (circa 1970 network television anyway) as eldest Bolt brother Jason--he of the broad shoulders, fringed leather shirt, and square-jawed, impudent grin.
Brown was a looker, with his big white teeth, tousled curly hair and expressive brown eyes—or were they dark blue?—and his Jason was articulate, athletic and very much in charge (Picture a compact, small screen version of Burt Lancaster in his
Crimson Pirate,
The Flame and The Arrow and
His Majesty O’Keefe days), the natural leader of the brothers and of the town, much to the annoyance of aforementioned Aaron Stempel, his chief rival.
More than that, Robert Brown gave Jason Bolt a probing intelligence and appealing sensitivity to balance all that robust macho presence. He also brought a certain— I can’t find any better word to describe it—
poetry to the role, something about his speech cadences suggesting a lyrical quality, a graceful, self-assured charm and love of language. (Think Errol Flynn in
Captain Blood, The Loves of Don Juan, or pretty much anything.)
Let the silly teeny-boppers squeal over the baby-faced, bashful Sherman and the blue-eyed, hot-headed Soul, my heart belonged forever, which is to say, for the length of the series’ run, to the rugged Robert Brown, and in my fevered pre-pubescent imagination I continually cast myself as the most beauteous of the “brides”, a saucy, spirited lass with flowing golden blonde or flaming Technicolor hair, flawless pale skin and deeply lashed, cornflower blue eyes--there were no black brides on Bridal Veil Mountain, but you knew that--who, in a pivotal episode or perhaps a heart-tugging two-parter, caught Jason Bolt’s roving eye and won his guarded heart. Yes.
And what would happen after that I could never quite work out, since, though the Bolt boys were obviously allowed to fall in love and did so often, they were apparently never allowed to
stay in love, remaining bachelors for the run of the series--the sort-of exception to this state of affairs being the "understanding" between Jeremy and Candy Pruitt, the prim and pretty "leader" of the Bridal Veil brides; the two of them were nervous 19th century high-schoolers everyone knew was going steady.
I liked Candy too. She was a bit highly strung, but she had something going on there that appealed to me. I liked her tentative smile and the rakish tilt of her bonnet, and the way her shiny chestnut hair bounced on her back as she made her striding, purposeful way around town when she was het up about something. Candy's laughter often had a hysterical edge, but in her calmer, serious moments, when she kept her voice steady and pitched it seductively low-- usually when she was trying to reassure the eternally insecure Jeremy about something--she sounded uncannily like a summer camp counselor I'd obsessed over when I was 10.
Of course I've long since forgotten that young woman's name... but I'll remember forever that she loved the song "Pretty World" by Sergio Mendes and Brasil '67, and how monumentally important that was to me. As usual, I was hanging around her office and she'd been in the midst of teasing me about my impromptu semi-strip tease of the previous evening (Apparently becoming bored with all the up-with-people sing-alongs, I'd impulsively leapt to my feet and launched into a vampy bump and grind to the tune of "Hey, Big Spender") when the familiar opening melody of the delectable bossa nova-pop song stopped her mid-sentence and we both rushed to the radio dial to crank up the volume, both of us singing passonately along with vocalist Lani Hall.
Also she--my camp counselor, not Ms. Hall--smoked incessantly (Were they Kools? Lucky Strikes? Benson & Hedges?) and I remember trying to climb into her lap, leaning into her as she lounged in a deck chair lazily blowing smoke rings, putting my face right into the curling wisps of smoke, and whispering to her that I loved... cigarettes. Not true, of course. It made my nose itch and my eyes tear. But with her, in that charged moment, I loved... cigarettes. ("You shouldn't", she'd cautioned, frowning, her face close, her eyes searching mine, "It's bad for you." And she made me get off her lap.)
Probably Jason and I were going to marry but a log or something fell on me, see, and then--tragically and conveniently--I died brave and beautiful in his arms, haunting his dreams for years to come… something to that effect.
Predictably, it wasn’t long after
Here Come the Brides went to that great logging camp in the sky that I lost track of Robert Brown. I caught glimpses of him now and then in guest appearances on other TV series, most notably as a fisherman statue come magically to over-amorous life (don’t ask) on back-to-back episodes of
Bewitched, rather a come down after his heroic Jason characterization in
Brides.
My affections subsequently transferred, such is the fickleness of a restless 11 year old heart, to, in no particular order,
It Takes A Thief’s arch smoothie Alexander Mundy,
Bonanza’s pugnacious Little Joe Cartwright (and later, good-natured Ponderosa cowhand, “Candy” Canaday), and
The Mod Squad’s earnest, conflicted Pete Cochran, he of the ringlet brown hair and angst-y, awkward mannerisms, among others.
I loved
The Mod Squad, didn't you? It spoke to me, was talkin’ ‘bout my generation (well, sort of) and like all the media that grabbed me in those years, offered up images to emulate and swoon over, often simultaneously.
But
The Mod Squad, which first aired in ‘68 when I was a suggestible 10 year old and ended in ‘73 when I was a sophisticated 15 (or possibly vice versa), was symbolic of my schizoid childhood experience with mainstream network television and the interesting dilemmas it presented for me. Not really consciously, mind you— I was a bright kid but not
that self-aware— but there were choices to make here, and to this day I can’t pin down exactly what those choices were saying about me and how much about American television (and by implication American society) in the sixties and seventies.
Let’s see… Tige Andrew’s Capt. Greer was too bulky, too serious and too middle-aged, so of course he never made the list. And the willowy, sad-eyed Peggy Lipton’s Julie Barnes was of enormous interest to me, but in such a buried, don’t ask, don’t ever tell sort of way that it barely registered. And then there was Linc…
I’d tried to include Clarence Williams The Third’s Lincoln Hayes in my fantasies, but it just wouldn’t take. For one thing, Linc was so cool, coiled and self-contained he seemed out of reach; while I did admire his deadpan self-reliance, I didn’t quite know how to relate to him even as I knew I was supposed to. For me the basic problem was that, through no fault of his own, Linc (and Clarence) was, um… black.
I mean Linc was seriously black. He was not reassuring, conciliatory, likeable, easy-going, Sidney-Poitier-in-Lilies-of-the-Field black— on the contrary. Soul brotha Linc Hayes seemed to my wide, anxious eyes a bruised, pissed-off, Eldridge Cleaver, Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Up The Establishment, Youdon’tunderstand!Iain’tscaredayoumuthafucka!s kind of Black Man; the kind of Black Man that had had
enuff, was on the
verge, was not takin' it from nobody no more.
That was a little too scarily real for an innocent little wannabe-white girl like me— oh yes, I was white; I’d made up my mind about that, too. The outside me may have been a Negro (Negress?), possibly even black, but I knew what was what, and I’d made up my mind. Even if
Mod Squad’s Linc Hayes had been the cute and cuddly type it would have made no difference to me. Though these were now the exciting, defiant, Black Power years, the era of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” Queen Aretha’s “Respect”, and James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)”, I had eyes and I knew.
If Black was so beautiful, why didn’t Miss Clairol, the Breck Girl, or any of the For Brunettes Only models look like the outside me? None of them did. They looked like Cheryl Tiegs, Jean Shrimpton, Jennifer O’Neill and Lauren Hutton.
They looked like Peggy Lipton and Lynda Day George and Farrah Fawcett and Laurie Partridge (I mean, Susan Dey) and the very few beauties of color of which I was then aware—the iconic Lena Horne, the classy Diahann Carroll (star of the then ground-breaking new sitcom Julia) and, slightly later, the stunning high fashion model Beverly Johnson—strongly resembled, as someone famously observed, “white women dipped in chocolate.”
See? I knew.
And that discernment— that the ones who mattered were of course always white— was so ingrained that I could not be persuaded otherwise, even by an exceptional stunner like Judy Pace, the dark-eyed and very dark-skinned California beauty cast in 1968 as a scheming temptress on the nighttime TV soap opera Peyton Place, a first, I think, for a black actress. That breakthrough led Pace to a co-starring role on the relatively short-lived TV series The Young Lawyers (which appeared to take its rebellious/idealistic-youth-as-new-authority premise from The Mod Squad) and lots of episodic TV appearances, before and since.
Though she never quite achieved “major” stardom Judy Pace was memorable in some notable films of the era—’68 seemed really to be her year—including a swingin’ sixties bit of contrivance called
Three in the Attic co-starring rebel-hottie Christopher Jones; a walk-on role as The Pretty Girl in the stylish, original, Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway version of
The Thomas Crown Affair; and most especially as the tough, sultry, and determinedly amoral Iris in the riotous
Cotton Comes to Harlem. Judy Pace was a sexy, gorgeous and talented black girl and— sadly, unfortunately— the significance of her presence was the blinkered exception, not the rule, in my movie-TV universe.
Apart from Pace, all the movie-TV girls who romanced or were romanced by the movie-TV guys I was most attracted to, and all the movie-TV girls whose glam and upwardly mobile lifestyles I yearned to possess—the girls to whom I was most furtively, secretly attracted (following all this?)—all of those girls were, inevitably, fair-skinned and silken-haired, like
That Girl’s sunny, fabulously clad Ann Marie, the aforementioned Miss Partridge and nearly all of the Brady girls— oh, who’s kidding whom here? I mean of course Marcia-Marcia-Marcia— though like you I’m sure, my Marcia Brady infatuation ended with a cringe the year Mike and Carol and Alice and the kids went live with that hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-
Brady Bunch Variety Hour! claptrap.
