why Herman spent the money (laughs)! Of course, I know that he and Roger were into the quick buck market and knew that Middle America loved to have the hell frightened out of them back then, just as they do today. However, when I see such unbelievable crap, I can’t help but think they could have done something worthwhile with those bucks. God, what a dreadful thing! My quick in- and-out appearance [as that lab technician] in- cluded. I have little recall of anything I did during that time; I guess part of my subconscious wanted desperately to forget the entire period.
Did you socialize with the cast of HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER?
I ran around in the same group as Gary Conway. He and I and John Ashley later palled around together in Rome in the early ’60s while I was working on CLEOPATRA [1963]. I don’t think Gary was over there for more than a few weeks. Morris Ankrum and I had known each other at the Playhouse. Seems to me we were in a play called THE PRESCOTT PROPOSALS with [THE TINGLER’s] Judith Evelyn, which was something about the UN. Gary Clarke and I became friends in the late ’60s. I remember I went to the opening for a song-and- dance act he had put together, but don’t remem- ber much else except that I was dating the show’s choreographer, Gayla Graves. Seems to me Gary also had a series at Warner at that time. [Clarke was a regular on the Warner-produced series HONDO in 1967. —Ed.]
You appeared on the TV series NORTHWEST PASSAGE.?
At the time, I was dating a gal named Michele, who was the daughter of the show’s makeup man, Paul Dusick. She later became a big star on KNOTS LANDING under the name Michele Lee. I hated the skullcap I had to wear, which supported the so- called Mohawk hairdo, as well as the 4:00 a.m. makeup call, but Paul was great and had some of the most amazing stories about the people he had worked with. I think he had worked on THE TEN COMMANDMENTS [1956] and had done all the work on Charlton Heston. The cast of NORTHWEST PASSAGE were great to work with. Keith Larsen was from Ogden, Utah, so we had fun exchanging stories about the state. Paul Fix, who played my dad in the episode, became a good friend. We worked together for a couple of weeks on RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP [1958] with Burt Lancaster. I should add that I did an episode of the MEN OF ANNAPOLIS TV series. Never saw it, and I don’t know if it was ever aired.
No “Blaisdell scowl” here—so possibly one of the masks Rodd Dana manufactured for the color climax of HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER.
I didn’t realize you were in RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP.
You hear me a couple of times, but you never see me. I seemed to have that kind of illustrious career in Hollywood—always on the cutting room floor. Same thing happened in CLEOPATRA. I worked for nearly a year and appear infrequently throughout the Egypt sequence with Rex Harrison, and I had one great scene with Elizabeth Taylor, which ended up being edited down to nothing. In the final cut, you see the whole thing from so far away, I might as well have been a prop man dropping her off at Caesar’s door.
Your credits during the 1950s are sparse. Did you work other types of jobs for income in between gigs?
As I mentioned, I did a lot of commercials dur- ing that last period in Hollywood. I did two Viceroy Cigarette commercials, a Vitalis one that seemed to run forever, one for Brylcreem (I had lots of dark and greasy hair in those days) and a couple for Chevron. I was the man on the flying Chevron credit card. I still own a couple of shares of Chev- ron I bought at the time. Actually, this is the pe- riod in which I worked at Fox. However, about the time of the ill-fated HELIMARINES pilot at Fox, I was sick of the Hollywood scene and decided to return to my original study of medicine at UCLA. At the end of my first year, I met several guys who
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