by John O’Dowd 2009
In the show business hierarchy, no one has struggled harder for professional validation than the male model. Impeccably groomed and suited, these finely-chiseled gentlemen have toiled anonymously in front of the cameras for years, often with little respect paid for their efforts. Beginning in the late 1950s, one of the busiest of this natty, if unsung, breed was William Ramage, a former Texan who had earlier parlayed his father’s association with billionaire Howard Hughes into a film contract with RKO Pictures.
The year was 1954 and the studio was in the throes of a mass upheaval and limping steadily toward extinction. As one of RKO’s last acquisitions, Bill Ramage was placed in background roles in two of the studio’s most infamously bad, latter-day projects, but soon afterward he found himself lost in the shuffle at a company in its final days of business. Immensely photogenic and blessed with a chameleon-like quality before the camera, Bill studied the situation at hand and quickly realigned his goals under the tutelage of RKO’s gifted still photographer Ernie Bachrach. Upon the studio’s demise in 1957, Bill took Bachrach’s advice and embarked on a career as a photographer’s model in both fashion and product illustration, where he eventually became, for a period of time, the highest paid male model in the country.
Born August 27, 1933 in Shreveport, Louisiana, Bill Ramage jokes, AI share a birthday with both Mother Teresa and Lyndon Johnson⎯wow, talk about three completely different people. If that trio doesn’t blow astrology right out of the water, I don’t know what does!@ A supreme raconteur whose keen wit is matched by a brilliant acumen in business, Bill recently sat down with writer John O’Dowd to share the fascinating story of how a shy, young man from Louisiana’s Delta Plains traveled west and found steady work beneath the bright studio lights.
John O’Dowd: What kind of work did your parents do?
Bill Ramage: My father, Bowen, worked for Sparko Gas and Oil as a service manager, and my mother, Lucille, was a housewife. Shreveport, Louisiana in the 1930s is a wonderful memory for me and I loved it there. My father made some wise land investments and he provided our family with a wonderful and very comfortable life. One night in 1936, Dad attended a dinner banquet where he had received a big job promotion, and on the way home, he was involved in a terrible car crash. He was thrown through the windshield and although he was not physically disfigured, his recuperative period was a long one and his job eventually went to someone else. After about a year, Dad went to work for The Atlas Oil and Gas Refinery in Shreveport.
JO’D: How did your father wind up working for Howard Hughes?
BR: In the 1930’s Howard Hughes took more of an interest in his Hughes Tool Company than he did later on, when his interests became more diversified. He met my father a couple of times at the Atlas refinery and he evidently liked him a lot. He eventually hired Dad to work for a refinery he owned in Colorado. It was a good job with great pay, however, my mother didn’t like living in Colorado, so we moved again, this time to Dallas, Texas, in 1940. My father found a job as a line foreman at The Ford Motor Company for a while and then he worked in Houston as an inspector at a military ship building plant.
JO’D: Did your father ever discuss Howard Hughes with your family?
BR: Well, you know, one of the conditions of working for Howard Hughes was absolute secrecy. One was never to discuss him! (laughs) Not even Hughes wife, Jean Peters, ever spoke about him. However my father did share a story with me once about Hughes landing a big plane at Barksdale Field in Shreveport early one morning and then sitting on the curb drinking milk out of a glass bottle. A policeman friend of my father’s came by and saw Hughes, and thinking him a vagabond, called Dad to come out to the airstrip to identify him! It appears that Howard Hughes was untidy and a bit strange, even back then.
JO’D: As a teenager in Dallas, you knew Jayne Mansfield (The Girl Can’t Help It) pretty well. What was she like as a young girl?
BR: I knew Jayne as Vera Jayne Peers…a sweet girl, very ambitious and bright. She loved movies and always wanted to be a movie star. Jayne lived in University Park near SMU, and I would see her often at the swimming pool at Curtis Park. And, yes, she did look great in a bikini…even in those years! (laughs)
While attending Highland Park High School, Jayne married Paul Mansfield and they had a daughter, Jayne Marie, a few months after Jayne graduated. The following January she came down to Austin to attend the University of Texas, where I was enrolled, and we continued our friendship. Jayne was always very ambitious. She worked several jobs at once and attended school full-time, often bringing the baby with her to class. Jayne would leave Jayne Marie in her baby carriage just outside the classroom. You could do things like that back then without worrying, you know? It was an entirely different world. Jayne modeled for the art students and she also worked at the Austin Civic Theater, as well as for a local veterinarian. Jayne always loved animals. She had a heart of gold.
JO’D: What are your thoughts about what happened to her life and career later on?
BR: Although I knew her quite well in Dallas, I saw Jayne Mansfield, the movie star, only a few times in Hollywood. She was always very friendly, the same sweet girl I had known in Texas. I think if she had been utilized in more serious films like The Wayward Bus (in which she was quite good), she would have had a whole different career. Instead, she became a parody and a joke. As I’m sure everyone knows, Jayne began to drink heavily in the early 60s. One night I saw her dancing at The Peppermint West when the Atwist@ was popular and she was absolutely swacked! We spoke and while she was friendly, she was also very, very drunk. Jayne was married to Mickey Hargitay at the time and he was trying to get her to leave. They were with a party of people including the dress designer Marusia, who seemed to revel in being a part of Jayne’s entourage. For some reason, she was discouraging Mickey from taking Jayne home. Mickey finally left alone⎯very angry. This was not the Jayne I had known back in Dallas. There were, of course, several other public incidents after that…all of them, embarrassing.
Over time, Jayne’s career just disintegrated. Her looks suffered from the drinking…she became involved in sordid publicity. Her involvement with San Francisco warlock Anton LaVey and his devil worshipers had to be the absolute nadir of her publicity stunts. I thought that was a really bad move on her part. But in spite of everything, I always adored Jayne. And I know she really loved her children.
JO’D: When did you decide to move to Los Angeles and pursue a career in show business?
BR: After graduating from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1950 I attended Texas University for three and a half years. In my junior year, I went to England and studied one semester at University of London. I earned my B.A. in English, even though I knew from about the age of seven that I wanted to be an actor. My father had taken me to see Blood and Sand as a child, and that one film planted the seed in me. The movie starred Tyrone Power, Rita Hayworth and Linda Darnell. It was in color and the richness and beauty of it really inspired me. Although I was an extremely shy child, I later studied acting with a wonderful teacher in Dallas named Pearl Wallace Chappell. I quickly grew to love the laughter and the attention that acting brought me. I guess down deep I always knew what I wanted to do with my life, so right after my college graduation in 1954, I left for California.
JO’D: Upon your arrival in Hollywood, you were signed to RKO Studios as a contract player. You have admitted to me that your father’s friendship with Howard Hughes, the studio’s owner, helped you land the contract.
BR: Let’s put it this way⎯it definitely got me through the door. My weekly paycheck of $150 came through RKO’s paymaster, Mazzios Damon, but my contract was with Hughes Tool Company. That was not unusual for actors signed by Howard Hughes. Later, when he sold RKO, all the contracts were also sold⎯all except for Jane Russell’s, I think. Anyway, my contract was pretty standard with options every six months and a $50 a week raise after the first year. The second year the raise was $50 every six months for the next two years. It was a typical beginner’s contract.
JO’D: Following your signing to RKO in 1954, you were given bit parts in The Conqueror with John Wayne and Susan Hayward, and Cattle Queen of Montana with Ronald Reagan and Barbara Stanwyck. Both these films have long been considered “turkeys”, haven’t they?
BR: They were turkeys! (laughs) Oh, God, I think everyone on the planet was in The Conqueror. It was one of the most ludicrous films ever made! Come on…John Wayne as Genghis Khan? I must say, however, I found his wonderful sense of humor a surprise. He was not nearly as stoic as he appeared to be. I remember being completely star struck on that film. I played one of Susan Hayward’s slaves and I recall staring at her all the time⎯she was so beautiful. However, when she wasn’t filming, Susan looked kind out of place in her diaphanous chiffon costumes as she was also often wearing modern-day, horn-rimmed glasses! There were hundreds of “extras” from Central Casting on that film, and I noticed they were a strange lot, definitely a breed apart from the rest of us. They were, shall we say, a bit rough around the edges, and they always stayed to themselves.
I wasn’t given any dialogue in the film because RKO was trying to rid me of my thick Texas accent. The studio sent me to work with Gertrude Fogler, the speech teacher at MGM, and she helped me a lot. My main speech exercise was “Papa put Paul on the pony in the park.” Enunciated very slowly, it was supposed to completely eliminate my Texas twang. RKO took the cost of my lessons with Ms. Fogler out of my paycheck. She once told me a really funny story about Zsa Zsa Gabor. They were working one day on speech exercises and Ms. Fogler was called away. She told Zsa Zsa to work on her “w’s.” Zsa Zsa said, “I am vorking on them!” (laughs)
In my second film at RKO, Cattle Queen of Montana, I merely road a horse in several location shots on the RKO ranch…a glorified “extra”. The first day on the set, I was introduced to both Ronald Reagan and Barbara Stanwyck. At the time, I attributed that privilege to my being under contract to the studio. Reagan impressed me with his great posture. He was a very cordial man but I recall he seemed puzzled by the script, which was understandable since it made absolutely no sense! I remember the studio had Barbara Stanwyck put a colored rinse in her hair everyday so that it would photograph red. She had some gray in her hair, which was very attractive, but for some reason the Technicolor cameras needed her hair to have a certain shade of red. Barbara Stanwyck was a very lovely person and many years later I knew her socially. One day on the set, she smiled at me, and I was, as we said in those days, “on cloud nine!”
JO’D: What other film and/or TV work did you do during this time?
BR: All my television work came later on, in the 1960s. I did just one other film while I was under contract, An Annapolis Story, with John Derek and Diana Lynn. That wasn’t for RKO, though, that was on loan out for Allied Artists. I was in the military ball scene, and I also had a few other small scenes. RKO’s Head of Production, Eddie Grainger, had earlier sent me a memo ordering me to get a haircut for the role. He said with my long hair I looked “…too much like Veronica Lake”, so I wound up getting a flat top. I still have that memo, too! (laughs)
JO’D: Who were some of the other fledgling actors and actresses who were signed to RKO at the same time you were?
BR: There weren’t many contract players left at RKO by the time I got there, and even fewer signed directly to Howard Hughes. By 1954 the lot was pretty much dead. Let’s see, there was Mona Knox (The Las Vegas Story), who recently passed away, a young actor named Frank Griffin (Teenage Crime Wave), who was the brother of actresses Debra Paget, Teala Loring and Lisa Gaye, and a gorgeous young girl named Joyce Taylor (Atlantis, the Lost Continent). Joyce was a singer who had been under contract to Liberty Records, and she later did a good movie with David Janssen, called Ring of Fire. She was a beautiful lady⎯and very talented, too⎯but she later married a stockbroker and left the business. The RKO lot was really more like an empty ghost town than a bustling movie studio by the time I got there.
JO’D: Were there any films you were up for at RKO that you didn’t get, but wished that you had?
BR: There was a juvenile delinquent film called The Young Stranger that was designed to introduce James MacArthur, whom RKO had signed to a contract in 1956. I tested for the part of his best friend, however the casting director, Bill White, did not like the Hughes actors, preferring the RKO people instead. So, that was one part I had really wanted that I lost. Truthfully, RKO didn’t know what to do with me, so after a while, they stopped putting me in anything.
Despite the difficulty I was having in getting decent film roles, Perry Lieber, the Head of Publicity at RKO, liked me and kept me busy in the still gallery. Ernie Bachrach was the best still photographer at any of the studios and he had noticed that I never photographed the same way. When he discovered that about me, you would have thought that he had discovered radium. He loved it! Ernie⎯who, by the way, also loved the ladies⎯suggested I should try modeling. By then, RKO was really on its last legs.
JO’D: What were those last days at RKO like?
BR: Bill Dozier, who later produced television’s Batman, was president of RKO at the time and he and Eddie Grainger butted heads constantly. The studio produced and released some terrible movies (I Married A Woman, All Mine to Give, etc.), and then all of a sudden production was at a complete standstill. Bill Dozier was out on his ass after a year. General Tire and Rubber Company came in and bought the studio and the new people knew nothing about making movies. It was costing far too much money for them to keep it open with absolutely no activity.
In 1956, a film called The Girl Most Likely, with Jane Powell and Cliff Robertson, was one of RKO’s last productions. After that, the studio tried a remake of Stage Struck (Katharine Hepburn had won an Oscar in the original film, Morning Glory). Susan Strasberg had the lead role but the film couldn’t compete with Hepburn’s, not even with Henry Fonda as Susan’s leading man. That movie was probably RKO’s death. After it came out, General Tire made an agreement to have everything that was already completed released through Universal-International, and then we were all shown the door.
JO’D: Is that when you decided to get into modeling?
BR: Yes. Ernie Bachrach put me in touch with John Engstead, who was one of Los Angeles’ top commercial photographers at the time, and he agreed to work with me. The test shots we did together turned out great, and almost right away, I landed my first modeling job⎯a toothpaste ad with a gorgeous young model named Joanne Gilbert. Jayne (Mansfield) heard I had several modeling jobs lined up, and she suggested I get an agent. I was just a kid from Texas, very green, and I knew nothing about the business! So, Jayne sent me to see Emmeline Snively at Blue Book Models. Ms. Snively was a legend in the industry, having discovered Marilyn Monroe, among many others. She also discovered a male model named Eric Fleming, who later branched out into acting and had a television series (Rawhide) and a popular film with Zsa Zsa Gabor (Queen of Outer Space)! (laughs) Emmeline signed me to her agency and was instrumental in getting me a series of catalogue and magazine ads, both in New York and L.A.
JO’D: And yet you have said that your modeling career didn’t really take off until you signed with an agent by the name of Anita Colby.
BR: That’s right. Anita Colby was called “The Face” and she was the top female fashion model in the 1930s and 40s. She had formed her own agency in 1958 and she loved the photos I had done with John Engstead, so she signed me to a contract. I remember Anita telling me that she liked my “wholesome, All-American look”. She knew bread and butter for modeling was catalogue and magazine work, and she was convinced I had the look she could market. Anita also made sure I owned the rights to all my photos. From the start, there was a clause written into all my contracts that allowed me to review all my contact sheets and to kill any photos I didn’t like. I was the first model (male or female) to get that privilege. Anita and I were kind of pioneers in that regard.
The years I worked for Anita Colby were a very exciting time in my life. The female models in those days were gorgeous! I would live several months in New York and then go back to L.A. to keep my toe in acting. Getting dropped when RKO closed didn’t bother me as much as I had feared because my modeling career took off right away.
JO’D: Speaking of gorgeous models, one of the most beautiful in the 50s had to be Suzy Parker. Did you work with her?
BR: Yes, Suzy and I did a lot of catalogue work together. Suzy Parker was, without a doubt, the best model ever! That megawatt smile of hers was nothing short of dazzling. One shoot we did together was for the cover of a jazz album, Dave Brubeck’s Red Hot and Blue. It was a particularly great shoot because Suzy looked so exquisite. She was dressed all in red, leaning over a piano in a nightclub. I was sitting at a table by the piano, looking at her. Because it was thought in those days that jazz mainly appealed to intellectuals, I wore eyeglasses in the photo. It was an incredible shot. Suzy Parker was a stunning piece of perfection, God rest her soul. [author’s note: Suzy Parker died on May 3, 2003 at the age of 70.]
JO’D: Your first photo shoot for Anita Colby was for Mutual of Omaha. What was that modeling experience like for you?
BR: The ad was actually for Mutual of New York (MONY) and it was an exhilarating experience. I was a father returning home from work, being greeted by his two children and his wife. I remember Anita searched long and hard to find two children who resembled me and I thought the two youngsters she found, a brother and sister, did, in fact, look a lot like me. By the way, the cab driver in the shoot was a real cabbie. I remember he kept the meter in his cab running during the entire shoot! Insurance companies always budget commercial shoots very carefully, and it was cheaper to use a real cabdriver than to hire a model.
JO’D: Please describe what a typical day in the life of a male model was like in the 1950s and 60s.
BR: They were long days, that’s for sure. For one thing, you needed lots of money to pay the cab fare in NY, so you could get from one spot to another! (laughs) Seriously, it was tedious work at times. Time consuming, repetitive…you had to make sure you always looked good. You couldn’t look tired…you couldn’t be out of shape. What they wanted from me, for instance, was that “well-scrubbed” look. Very thin, almost to the point of emaciation, but with good shoulders and pecs. You had to be ten pounds lighter because of the camera. It wasn’t easy! There were demands and standards you had to live by, or you were out. But, let’s face it, the payoffs were great. I loved the pretty girls, the clothes, the attention. I mean, who wouldn’t? I remember walking down the Sunset Strip one day in the early 60s and seeing a mammoth billboard advertisement looming overhead, of me smoking a cigarette. I was in awe…it was pretty damn exciting!
To show you how things sometimes went on these photo shoots, I was hired once to do an ad for Carlings Beer. It was shot in New York in the summer on an excruciatingly hot and muggy day. It was at a time when NY used to experience “brown outs” and during the shoot the air conditioning went off and wouldn’t come back on. The beer kept going flat with the heat and I was perspiring profusely in a wool Pendleton shirt. No matter how hard she tried, the makeup artist couldn’t keep me “powdered down”…beads of sweat kept popping out on my forehead and top lip. The beer may have gone flat, but I was frothing at the mouth! (laughs) They finally brought in a couple of fans. The beer was discarded and they wound up using creme soda in which they stirred in a little Rinso to get a nice head on the “beer”. (laughs) Just one of the tricks of the trade, and believe me, back then there were many!
JO’D: Through your acting career in L.A., you met a lot of Hollywood performers. I know you were very close to the beautiful, Italian-Irish actress Gia Scala (The Guns of Navarone), who had an extremely difficult life.
BR: Oh, dear, sweet Gia. She was an absolute angel and I loved her very much. We met in 1957, on the set of her film, Don’t Go Near The Water, on Lot 3 at MGM. My heart almost stopped beating when I saw her the first time. She was, without a doubt, the most gorgeous creature I have ever seen. Imagine how pleased I was to learn that she was as nice as she was beautiful. We hit it off immediately and were best friends for the next fifteen years.
Gia was childlike in some ways, and yet very sophisticated in others. She was a good actress and had some strong film roles until the early 1960s, when things began to go downhill for her. She was very well read and she painted beautifully. She was also a wonderful cook. Gia liked people and she trusted them. However, I believe her trust in some instances was misguided. I’ve missed her everyday since she died in April 1972.
Gia and I were very good friends of Guy Williams (Zorro) and his wife Jan. Guy and Gia had met in the late 50s when they were both under contract at Universal-International. I don’t know if people know this, but Guy was Italian and his real name was Armand Catalano. He and Jan lived in a beautiful, Spanish-styled mansion on Hillside Avenue, next door to Raymond Burr, and Gia and I went up there a lot to visit them. Jan and Gia were both great cooks and Guy was easy to talk to. He was down-to-earth and rarely ever played the part of the “actor”. It was fun riding around town in Guy’s hot, red Ferrari. It was a dynamite-looking car and he loved it!
JO’D: There’s been some controversy in recent times about the cause of Gia Scala’s death. Much of the information has been dispensed in interviews given by her sister, Tina Scotti (AKA Tina Scala). Would you like to take this opportunity to clear some things up about Gia’s last years?
BR: Contrary to what’s been reported in the past, Gia and her sister were not close. Several years ago, Tina gave an interview to the late Bob Slatzer, the writer who claimed he was married at one time to Marilyn Monroe, and she said there were indications of foul play in Gia’s death. These allegations of Tina Scotti’s are simply not true.
Gia suffered through a host of emotional upheavals in her life over the years, including the death of her mother, with whom she was extremely close. She had married actor Don Burnett and was devastated when they later split up. In April 1971 Gia was arrested over a dispute with a downtown L.A. parking lot attendant when she refused to pay an additional fifty cents overtime charge, and a physical altercation ensued. Then, a few months later, her sports car turned over on a winding canyon road and she lost part of her index finger. In the months preceding her death, Gia had developed a stomach ulcer for which her doctor had prescribed liquid Donatol and the tranquilizer Valium. I knew she was ill but at the time I had no idea what was wrong with her. Looking back now, I recall that there were days when her lips actually looked blue! I remember the day we took a friend to The Movieland Wax Museum in Anaheim, near Disneyland, to see Gia’s wax figure from The Guns of Navarone. Gia received the red carpet treatment that afternoon and the photographer for the museum took several photos of her. She didn’t look that bad in person but I was horrified when I saw the pictures. Gia was not well and the camera picked up on it (as it so often does). In fact, I received the photos on the same day she died and I’m glad she never saw them. They were heartbreaking.
JO’D: What is the true story of Gia Scala’s death?
BR: Gia had moved back into the house in Laurel Canyon where she had lived when she was married to Don. There was a lot of construction work that needed to be done on the house and she found three young men who said they would help with the repairs and also do some much needed yard work for her. One of them moved into a small bedroom over the garage.
I remember there was a misunderstanding with the young men who were not doing the work Gia had hired them to do. She asked them to leave, and they did, without argument. The kid who was staying in the room over the garage returned later that day to get some of his possessions and to thank Gia for having given him a place to stay, and he’s the one who found her dead. It was immediately reported in the newspapers that she had died of an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol, but that wasn’t true.
I don’t deny that Gia drank. She drank white wine. But when she was found dead, there were only three Valium pills missing from the medicine bottle. I later read Gia’s death certificate and got to see for myself the real cause of her death. An autopsy revealed Gia had suffered from “advanced arteriosclerosis”, the same ailment that had killed her father. It was the real reason why her behavior was so bizarre in those last years. Her brain simply was not getting enough oxygen…it was beyond her control. I spoke to both Sgt. Estrada of the Hollywood Division LAPD and to the L.A. coroner, Dr. Thomas Noguchi about this. They stated unequivocally that there was absolutely no foul play involved in Gia Scala’s death, nor was her death a suicide. For anyone to suggest otherwise is extremely unfair and outrageous.
When Gia passed away, it was up to Jan Williams and me to make all the arrangements for her funeral. Tina Scotti tried to keep The Screen Actor’s Guild from giving Jan the death benefits Gia had left for her (about seven hundred dollars), but luckily she was not successful. I lost touch with Guy and Jan Williams after Gia died. They separated and he later moved to Buenos Aires because Zorro was still very popular there and he loved (and I guess, needed) the attention. Guy died in his home of a brain aneurysm in 1989. What made it especially sad is that he was all alone and his body wasn’t discovered for five days. Guy was really a terrific person…a good and decent man.
JO’D: In the 60s, you also knew Inger Stevens (The Farmer’s Daughter), another tragic Hollywood casualty.
BR: Inger had one of the most engaging smiles I have ever seen. However, as I soon learned, it often hid a broken heart. I will say this for her, though…she never brought anyone else down by unburdening her woes on them. Inger was always “up” and she always acted like she was on top of the world. Inger and Gia were neighbors on Woodrow Wilson Drive in Laurel Canyon and that’s how I met her. Over time, we got to know each other pretty well. I feel Inger Stevens fell in love too often with the wrong men. She had a secret…but this is not an issue now, nor do I wish to discuss it. It kills me to think of how needless her death was. As you say…a casualty.
Just think of the casualties among the young stars who started their careers about the same time as Gia and Inger: James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, Natalie Wood, Nick Adams, Jean Seberg and just shortly before them⎯Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe. It really is shocking when you stop to think about it.
JO’D: You also knew the late Barbara Payton (Bride of the Gorilla), an actress who had one of the most tragic lives in the history of Hollywood. She’s also gotten an incredibly bad rap through the years, with many painting her as a kind of sex-crazed barracuda. Please tell us who you think she really was.
BR: If the preceding individuals were tragic⎯and they are⎯then the life of Barbara Payton has to be right out of Grand Guignol horror! I had two very memorable (and distinctly different) meetings with Barbara. I met her the first time in the fall of 1958. It was at a small dinner party up on Sunset Plaza Drive, at the beautiful hilltop home of Milton and Charlene Golden. Mr. Golden was Barbara’s longtime attorney, and he was a close friend of mine, as well. Barbara and Charlene had spent the afternoon and the previous day reupholstering Milt’s favorite chair and ottoman in his home office. Barbara had just returned from living in Mexico for three years and she looked absolutely beautiful. I thought she was a warm, elegant and incredibly charming girl. She and I had a wonderful conversation that night and I was greatly impressed by her. I noticed when I was talking to her, Barbara hung on every word I said like it was the most important thing she had ever heard.
Barbara was the best listener I have ever met. She had beautiful, crystal-blue eyes and you could just melt in that wide-eyed gaze of hers. In fact, Barbara had a unique way of making you feel as though what you were saying was the wisdom of the ages. Talk about an ego boost! I remember she did all the cooking that night. The menu was a great marinara sauce poured over al dente spaghetti with a delicious salad drenched in a creamy Italian dressing. Barbara Payton was extremely intelligent and very talented in many things. That’s why I find it just incomprehensible that her life turned out the way that it did.
The dinner party that night was a bit of subterfuge, really. Leonard Fruhman, a young assistant to the famed interior designer Irving Longionotti, had escorted Evelyn Stebbins, a socialite friend of the Goldens and Barbara, and I had brought my good friend, actress Joan Caulfield. Leonard wanted to inspect the work Barbara had done on the chair and the ottoman⎯with the prospect of Mr. Longionotti offering her a job. It would have been a great opportunity for her, however Barbara didn’t seem interested in getting a regular nine-to-five job. She wanted desperately to get her film career rolling again, but by then it was a lost cause.
When Milton tried to talk to her after dinner⎯just the two of them, off in a corner of the terrace at his home⎯about getting a full-time job outside the film industry, Barbara wouldn’t hear any of it! Even though her finances at the time were almost non-existent, Barbara was adamant about getting back into show business. She insisted she could get her career going again if she could just get one good acting job to let people know she was back from Mexico. She had even held an ill-advised press conference (in August 1958), which was basically a joke. There was nothing to announce, no new film or TV show. Just that she was “back in town”. Barbara’s previous bad publicity over the Franchot Tone/Tom Neal brawl and her arrest in 1955 for bouncing checks had ended any chance for a film career for her. The few reporters that were present at that press conference taunted her with cruel questions about her past and by the time they were finished grilling her, Barbara was very hurt and quite angry with them. Needless to say, her comeback never happened, and by 1959 Barbara was sliding downhill…fast.
JO’D: Did you keep in touch with her after the dinner party in 58?
BR: No, I didn’t see Barbara again until four years later. She was a completely different person by then…the things that happened to her in that four year span must have been appalling! One night in the fall of 1962, I saw her hitchhiking in the rain on the corner of Sunset Boulevard, off Gower Street by Columbia Square, so I stopped to give her a ride. I don’t even want to go into how bad she looked that night…let me just say it was hard to believe this was the same person who only a few years before had been so fetching and exquisite. Barbara acted confused and we barely spoke. She seemed to remember me from the Goldens dinner party because she did mention Joan (Caulfield) to me. Joan and I had driven Barbara home the night of the party to her little apartment on Ogden Drive, just off Sunset Boulevard. The night she was hitchhiking, she said she wanted to go to The Coach and Horses Bar in Hollywood. However, before we got there, she had me pull over. Barbara got out of the car and walked into the rain and the fog, and I never saw her again. A few years later she drank herself to death in her parents home. Barbara was basically a very nice person, but I believe it is possible she was mentally ill. She debased herself so inexplicably. Drugs…alcoholism… prostitution. She was truly one of the world’s lost souls.
JO’D: Back then, a lot of these performers personal problems were revealed to the public by several Hollywood gossip columnists (Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, Walter Winchell) who were notorious for their tough and sometimes cruel reporting style. Did you know any of them well?
BR: Only Walter Winchell…I wasn’t important enough to know the other two! I only met Hedda and Louella a few times. I sat next to Louella once on an airplane flight to New York from Los Angeles and we spoke briefly. Although I had heard, as did everyone, that she was quite a boozer, she didn’t touch a drop of alcohol during the flight. I do know that Hedda Hopper⎯if she liked you, that is⎯was a good and valuable person to have in your corner. Far tougher than either one of these women, though, was a nasty old bird named Florabel Muir, the Hollywood reporter for the New York Daily News. I know she absolutely despised Barbara Payton and often ripped her to shreds in her column. Florabel covered the beat for the LAPD and she knew all the dirt in town. She interviewed me once, in the RKO commissary. I remember her telling me that if I wanted to offer the press a beverage, “It better be booze, brother!” (laughs) Those ladies were powerful…and nasty!
Walter Winchell, on the other hand, was my friend. He was kind to me and I won’t allow anyone to say a negative word about him. Sadly, Walter was already losing his power when I knew him. He had a little bungalow at The Ambassador Hotel and he loved to use the putting green on the grounds. I lived a couple of blocks away at The Talmadge Apartments on Wilshire Boulevard and he would often ask me to drive him to the studios for various screenings. I took him to Metro the first night they screened Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), a film in which he was on the telephone talking to Geraldine Page, but off-camera. When the scene appeared, he was as excited as a child. Newspaper people will never have the kind of captive audience they did back then. They really could make or break careers…and they did!
JO’D: Who would you say were among some of the nicest and most down-to-earth individuals you’ve known in show business?
BR: Certainly Loretta Young, Barbara Stanwyck, Roger Moore, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., Richard Chamberlain (a man of great humor), Steve Forrest and Patricia Barry. Patricia has done a lot of episodic TV through the years, and several soap operas. A kind lady, a great actress and a superb hostess. And Vera Miles⎯the greatest and most delightful person of all!
Loretta Young was very friendly and approachable (and very honest). Miss Stanwyck (“Missy”) was tough, but a most considerate lady. A thorough professional. Steve Forrest, who is Dana Andrews brother, was very personable and always a pleasure to talk to. He tells great stories! Roger Moore stood behind me in the blood drive line for The Red Cross once, at Warner Brothers. I enjoyed his total candor, and he was oh so British! As we were standing there in line waiting to give blood, he turned to me and said (with a stiff upper lip), “I am not fond of needles!” (laughs) Roger and I are still friends today.
At Warners, a man named Bill Orr was Head of Television back then. His assistant was Hugh Benson and he and his wife Diane were later my neighbors and just about my best friends in Hollywood. They were two of the nicest people I ever met. Hugh was especially kind to young actors.
JO’D: Speaking of Warner Bros.,you worked on quite a few WB television series in the late 50s to early 60s, including Hawaiian Eye and 77 Sunset Strip. Were you under contract to the studio at the time?
BR: No, even though I worked there a lot, I was never under contract at Warners, only at RKO. Catherine Ehring, the secretary of WB casting director Hoyt Bowers, advised me that even if I was offered a contract with the studio, that I should refuse it. She told me they would never let me model, which was my chief source of income. Studio contract players in those days rarely were paid more than $750 a week. I knew I could always earn much more money modeling…and I did.
Beginning in the late 50s, WB produced a ton of TV shows (Cheyenne, Bourbon Street Beat, The Alaskans, Sugarfoot, Maverick, The Roaring Twenties, Bronco, Surfside Six, the two you mentioned, and a few others). In fact, one year I remember the studio had eleven shows on the air, all at one time! (They were all on ABC, too, I think.) Eddie Rhine, a casting director at Warners, knew me through Dick Stockton, a casting director at RKO. They were both professionals who looked for actors who were right for the parts before they sent them to meet the shows’ directors. Through them, I wound up getting a lot of work. However, I want to be sure that people know that I was never a “star” at Warner Brothers Television. All actors during this period of who were not under contract⎯as well as contract players⎯ took whatever jobs were offered. Some contract players had roles with no lines such as elevator operators, clerks behind counters in stores, shoppers, office personnel, and so on. There were also “silent bits.” A silent bit was where there were no lines but contact with a leading character. For instance…a handshake, but no dialogue. “Day players” did the same type of work. Sometimes casting people would use an actor just to see how good⎯or unfortunately, how bad⎯the actor appeared. One could do a larger part one week and be atmosphere and/or background the next week.
JO’D: There are some writers and self-professed film historians who make a habit of questioning an actor’s credits (and credibility) if they’re names are not listed on IMDb (The Internet Movie Database). How would you address these writers’ (sometimes quite vocal) skepticism?
BR: Yes, I know of one or two doing research articles now who obviously do not know the circumstances of employment for television and film in an era when actors worked with no regard to being “historically saluted.” All I can say is what I know and experienced myself. Billing, which some of these so-called “historians” search for in actors’ credits, was of little consequence in the 1950s and 60s. In fact, I know of an instance where Connie Stevens who was a regular as Cricket Blake on Hawaiian Eye, did a silent bit on 77 Sunset Strip with no billing. She was paid, though, for her work, as we all were. Back then, actors did whatever work was assigned to them. Even Bette Davis who was one of Warner Brothers Studios top stars did a part once with no dialogue and no billing! It was in the first shots of a major movie and Bette was costumed as a nurse. Why don’t one of those writers who seem to consider their work so thorough and above reproach, tell film buffs the name of the feature and the circumstances under which this was done? Even ads for products such as Lux soap or Jarman shoes could be assigned with no additional remuneration. This is one reason why I did not want a studio contract. The modeling would have been a conflict of interest and I needed to make a living.
JO’D: When you were working on a lot of the WB television shows in the early 1960s, were the shows themselves considered to be well written and of high quality?
BR: The shows were very popular but the scripts were usually awful and were constantly being recycled. For instance, the same script for Sugarfoot was used on Bronco, the same script for 77 Sunset Strip was used on Bourbon Street Beat, and so on. Pretty clever, right? Jack L. Warner was cheap beyond words. He used to go around the studio at six pm sharp and turn off any lights that had been left burning! (laughs) That’s a true story, by the way…ask anyone who worked at WB back then!
There were a lot of complaints about how WB treated actors in those days, but the studio always kept its contract players (and the rest of us) working. At the time, there were only 13,000 members in the Screen Actors Guild, and we all worked. Now, there are over 100,000 members and most are unemployed!
JO’D: What kinds of roles did you play on the WB shows?
BR: I played an assortment of playboys and cads, usually, with an occasional nice guy and a standard Western background character thrown in for good measure.(laughs) One role I did that I thought was kind of interesting was on Bourbon Street Beat. I played a Cajun lawbreaker just let out of jail who becomes involved in a ferryboat incident in Algiers, Louisiana. It was a lot different for me and I enjoyed it. I also worked in a pilot called Solitaire, with Richard Long. It didn’t sell, but I enjoyed working with Richard. He had a tragic life, and he, too, died young, at only 49.
JO’D: Do you have any interesting observations about any of the people you worked with on these shows?
BR: As far as their personalities go, a few were egomaniacs. In Hawaiian Eye, for instance, Robert Conrad struck me as being very full of himself. What an ego! Connie Stevens and Troy Donahue didn’t especially impress me, either. Connie was sickeningly sweet and kind of obnoxious. On the other hand, Will Hutchins, the star of Sugarfoot, was great, sincere, and a very nice guy. The same can be said of Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. (77 Sunset Strip). A wonderful man, probably one of the nicest in Hollywood. I had a great time working on Maverick…I loved working with James Garner and Jack Kelly (everyone did). Van Williams, of Surfside Six, was also a great guy. A fellow Texan from Fort Worth, he also wound up in banking, as I did. I adored Van’s co-star, Diane McBain, with whom I had a few lunches in The Green Room at the WB commissary. Diane was so pretty…but I had the feeling she wasn’t really into her career. And, she chain-smoked! One night I shared a table at a WB function with Diane, Suzanne Pleshette and Troy Donahue. The three of them had just done a film together called A Distant Trumpet. I remember the dinner very well because I spent the whole night going back and forth to the vending machine in the lobby to buy Pall Mall cigarettes for Diane!
As I said, I thought Roger Moore (The Alaskans) was a great guy, and I still do. But Dorothy Provine, from the same show, was very negative and unpleasant. Most actors can be very spoiled…bores, actually. Some of them did nothing but complain…and about the silliest things (such as incurring meal penalties and having to work overtime).
JO’D: What are “meal penalties”?
BR: We normally had an hour break for lunch. But sometimes, when we were shooting exteriors, some of the actors would be called back to the set before their lunch hour was up. Believe it or not, a few of the more troublesome types (who shall remain nameless) took this to SAG as a complaint, and it often went to arbitration and to extra pay for them in the event it was proven. Sometimes I didn’t blame Jack Warner for being such a bastard. It was either him or Columbia chief Harry Cohn who said, “I’ve known a thousand actors, and I never met a grateful one.” That is so true! (laughs)
Despite the difficulties, though, we always had a lot of fun. I think the funniest thing I ever witnessed during all the years I worked in Hollywood occurred on the set of Bronco. The show’s star, Ty Hardin⎯while a very nice guy⎯could never remember his lines. Ever! There was one scene where he rode up on his horse. I was also in the shot, sweeping off a deck in the background. Ty dismounted, tied the reins to a hitching post, then snapped his fingers at the script-girl and said, “Line?” (The camera was already rolling.) The script-girl answered (disgustedly), “The line is ‘Hello’.” (laughs) Ty was not the least bit embarrassed. I swear, that is a true story!
JO’D: During the time you were working on all these Warner Bros. TV shows, were you hoping to land a TV show of your own, or were you concentrating more on your modeling career?
BR: Although the print and fashion modeling paid my rent, what I really wanted to do were feature films. In 1961, I was close to getting a terrific part at WB in A Fever In The Blood, which had a good script. The film’s director, Vincent Sherman⎯who was a fine and decent man⎯told me the part was mine. But he later called me and apologized when Roy Huggins, the film’s producer, cast a WB contract player named Robert Colbert instead of me. It was as big a disappointment for me as not getting the Nick Adams part in Teacher’s Pet. I had tested for the part of Barney Kovac, but George Seaton, the director, told me it was merely a formality as the part was already mine. Then I read in Variety that Adams had been cast in the film instead. Elvis had Hal Wallis’ office intervene on Nick’s behalf because Nick was kissing Elvis’s butt during that period. I was crushed both times. But that’s show biz…98% disappointment and rejection.
Modeling was great for the longevity it gave my career. Mine lasted longer than most, but on the other side of the blade, the modeling work kept me from ever having any kind of name recognition with the public. I can’t complain, though. I sure made a nice chunk of change.
JO’D: Speaking of which, you told me that you earned over $85,000 one year from your modeling jobs alone. That was a pretty impressive amount in those days, wasn’t it?
BR: Absolutely! To put it in context, that’s about $500,000 in year-2008 dollars. I grossed that amount in 1958⎯the peak year of my modeling career. There was so much catalog work, I couldn’t keep up with it. I had to be in New York a lot, so there was never enough time to devote to my acting career in L.A. Making the rounds of the casting agencies was out of the question. That would have to be done in Hollywood, and as I said, most of the time I was in New York. There also wasn’t much time for a social life. I had to look good, man! (laughs) Anita Colby “sold” me with that guarantee. I never even went to many dinner parties. I had to look rested and in top shape at all times. Hey, modeling is a tough job…a lot of people don’t realize that.
JO’D: As a male earning his living, in effect, on the marketability of his looks, did you ever experience any prejudice or condescension from anyone for working in modeling?
BR: Hell, yeah! The movie industry in those days looked at models, both male and female, as they looked at extras: low men (and women) on the totem pole. They didn’t think models could act. “Just Another Pretty Face” was the war cry, and I heard it often. Even though I had studied with Baruch Lumet, the father of director Sidney Lumet⎯and Baruch was a prestigious coach⎯I had a hard time convincing anyone I was serious about acting. A lot of my contemporaries (Buck Class, Bob Hover, John Marion, Jim Horne and several others) struggled, as well. Buck was under contract to 20th Century Fox and did Blue Denim and a few other flicks, but he was no more successful in films than I was. The same goes for Bob Hover, who also worked at 20th under the name of Link Foster. We were all thought of as models, not as actors. Period.
JO’D: Being that you were a good-looking guy in Hollywood, you must have a lot of stories about the people you dated in those years. Can you recall one for us?
BR: (laughs) Yeah, as a matter of fact I can. There was a platinum blonde actress in town named Peggy Maley. She was under contract to Columbia in the 50s and did a lot of B-films for the studio (Human Desire, The Brothers Rico, Ride A Crooked Road, etc.) Peggy had once been a roommate of Ava Gardner’s in the 1940s and she was kind of a tough number with a reputation that wasn’t all that great. I took her out one night in the early 60s, and it was a total disaster!
For years, Jerry Wald at 20th Century Fox had a film script hanging around on the life of Jean Harlow. Jayne’s and Marilyn’s fingerprints had been all over it by the early 1960s, but there hadn’t been any takers. Peggy was staying at the time with my friend Leslie Snyder, who had once worked for Louella Parsons. After her acting career faded out in the late 50s, “Peggy June” (as she was sometimes billed) had left Hollywood to help run her father’s pizzeria back in New Jersey, but she had come back to talk about the Harlow part. The funny thing is, she was not even being considered for it. At 35, Peggy was blowsy and coarse and had far too many miles on her to play Jean Harlow, who died at 26.
Anyway, Leslie asked me to “be nice to Peggy” while she left for Las Vegas for a few days. I called her at Leslie’s, and she hinted that she did not have any dinner plans. Peggy told me she wanted to go to Au Petit Jean in Beverly Hills, the most “in” place to dine at the time. Tres elegante, very expensive…you know, the place to be seen. When I called my friend Bob Osborne and he told me who Peggy Maley was⎯that she had played one of the loud-mouthed hookers in The Wild One with Marlon Brando⎯I was not impressed. After I met her and saw that she talked non-stop, I was really not impressed! She was heavily made-up, dressed in one of Leslie’s mink stoles, and she looked like a real hooker! There was a motel a block away from my apartment on Sunset Plaza Drive with a coffee shop called The Knife and Fork, and I took her there rather than to Au Petit Jean. I remember we walked to the place. Peggy June was in spiked, high-heel vinyl shoes and to say she was pissed off is putting it mildly!
Peggy drank three Tanqueray and tonics before settling for “the ground round” $1.75 dinner. She followed that with mounds and mounds of vanilla ice cream topped with chocolate sauce for dessert. I had no drinks and ate a chef salad. Peggy babbled on and on and was tough as nails. Troy Donahue, who was always in the Knife and Fork looking for some female action, eyed me and Peggy, and seemed to have a new respect for me. (laughs) He came over to the table to say hello (he had worked with Peggy a year or two earlier in a film for U-I called Live Fast, Die Young). Troy had never before spoken to me when we worked together at WB. In retrospect, I should have dumped Peggy June on him and gone home alone. She’d have loved it, I’m sure. But maybe that’s why I didn’t do it! (laughs) Peggy was very pissed off at me for not taking her to Au Petit Jean for dinner, and when I brought her back to Leslie’s apartment and offered to open the door for her, she put the key in the lock and growled, “Don’t bother, I’ll do it!” No “Goodnight”. Not even “Kiss my ass.” She just let herself in and then slammed the door in my face. That was probably my worst date, ever! (laughs)
JO’D: Speaking of tough ladies, you knew Lucille Ball in the 60s. Was she really as difficult as has been reported?
BR: I didn’t know Lucille Ball all that well. We had many mutual friends but to tell you the truth, I didn’t really want to know her any better than I did! She could be, I’m told by many, to be somewhat overbearing…even shrewish. Her secretary, Mary Lou Tanner, who had been a performer once herself, was sometimes reduced to tears by Lucille’s rages. So was her wardrobe designer Edward Stevenson, who was a good friend of mine. He designed Lucille’s clothes at RKO and all the ones she wore on her TV shows in the 60s. Maury Thompson, a very funny man who directed many of Lucille’s shows, always called her “The Red Queen”. (laughs)
In all fairness, Miss Ball did start The Desilu Workshop in the late 1950s to give young Hollywood hopefuls a chance, and she worked very hard at it, too. It was her way of sharing some of the good fortune she had enjoyed with other young performers. I had several friends who were in the group at Desilu. They all had studio contracts and⎯along with Lucille⎯presented The Desilu Revue on stage at the old RKO little theater, which was on the same lot. The revue was also filmed and shown as a TV special during Christmas of 1959. I admire Lucille for starting that workshop. Young actors need all the support and nurturing they can get, and she was there to help them.
JO’D: Didn’t you work with Jack Benny in the late 50s?
BR: Yes, I had bit parts in two of his TV specials, taped at CBS Television City. Jack was always very much “the star”…always surrounded by a retinue of “yes” people. He was very personable, though. I remember he had Danny Thomas on the second show I did. Danny was nice to me, but kind of a difficult man. At one point he was improvising non-stop. Jack Benny yelled, “Did I hire you to do a monologue? Stick to the script!”(laughs) You know, the running gag with Jack was that he was only 39, so Danny Thomas responded by singing “You Make Me Feel So Young” to him. We all got a kick out of that! (laughs)
JO’D: You acted on a CBS soap opera in the early 1960s called The Brighter Day. Was that “live” TV?
BR: Yes, that was in 1962 and it was the best acting job I ever had! The show had been popular on radio for years. We did the TV show “live on tape” (as it was called in those days). We taped it about two weeks in advance. Catherine McLeod and Forrest Compton, two very fine actors, were also in the cast. I played an evil character named “Warren”. During the time I was on the show it seemed I couldn’t go anywhere without being recognized! My character was crippled, and I wound up getting killed when someone threw me and my wheelchair over a cliff. Great stuff, huh? (laughs)
JO’D: In the midst of your very busy modeling and acting career, you attended the University of Southern California and earned a Master’s Degree in English in 1962. What prompted your decision to continue your education during this time?
BR: Well, remember, back then it was very important for a man to pursue his education. My father had always been aghast at my fascination with acting. In the late 50s, when I came back from doing all that modeling work in The Big Apple, I decided I wanted to work on my Masters. It took several semesters to achieve my goal and to get my thesis written, but I did it. Needless to say, my father was very pleased.
JO’D: Your photo shoot for American Tourister Luggage in 1964 was probably your most famous ad. It ran everywhere for years. Please tell us about that job and the effect that it had on your modeling career.
BR: That shot just really caught the public’s eye. When you look at the ad, it almost looks like I’m imitating Gene Kelly. You know, dancing out the door with a big smile on my face and not a care in the world. (laughs) A very good photographer from Tel Aviv named Gideon Lewin shot that at Los Angeles International Airport at the TWA gate. It was a hot, smoggy day and I remember we used a lot of reflectors. By the way, the suitcase I was carrying was loaded with books and magazines! We did shot after shot of me coming out of that door, into that god awful heat. I got big bucks for that shoot and I earned it, too! (laughs)
Believe me when I tell you that businessmen really did dress that formally in 1964. The tailored glen plaid suit, the brushed felt hat I carried, the cashmere coat⎯all were standard attire for gents in the early 1960s. That ad got me a ton of print work for Sears, Montgomery Ward, I. Magnin and other big accounts. It was definitely my best known and most successful magazine ad.
JO’D: One of your most prominent magazine covers was for British Vogue in 1967. Did it bring you a lot of attention over here when it first hit the stands?
BR: No, it never hit the stands in this country, only in England. It was a special Carnaby Street issue of the magazine and it wound up selling thousands of copies. I was paid in British pounds, which came to about 5,000 U.S. dollars. Catherine Deneuve’s husband, David Bailey, photographed me for that shoot, and he did a brilliant job. I am told that all the young teenage girls in England loved the “mod” clothes I wore. They might not have been so enthralled if they had known that the cool-looking British guy in the photos was actually a “Yank” in his mid 30s! (laughs)
JO’D: In 1966, you had your first⎯and only⎯starring role in an Italian/British spy film entitled A Taste of Fear, co-starring Anne Baxter. It is probably one of the more obscure films out there.
BR: Obscure? That picture has disappeared off the face of the earth! It isn’t listed in any of Anne Baxter’s credits⎯or Carlos Thompson’s⎯or Claude Dauphin’s, for that matter! It was filmed in England and Italy by an Anglo-Italo company called Film-O Productions and later picked up by Columbia Pictures. I had a dual role in the film…and second billing. My scenes were shot in Brighton, England, and in a London film studio. While I was there, I was invited to visit the sets of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was shooting on the same lot. I knew the film’s star, Gary Lockwood, from Hollywood, and he took me to see a couple of the sets. I’ll never forget them, either. They were incredible! Film sets usually are not all that fascinating or spectacular, but those sets were absolutely majestic.
JO’D: What was the plot of A Taste of Fear?
BR: It was pretty outrageous, actually. Interpol asks an American in The State Department (me) who is the exact double of one of the Dutch smugglers (me again) of some art stolen by the Nazis in WWII to gain the confidence of Anne Baxter’s character and help them find the missing artwork. It was very much like all the other espionage films that were ground out in the 1960s…pretty off-the-wall!
JO’D: You were originally given top billing over Anne Baxter in the film, weren’t you?
BR: Yes, that’s true. Anne Baxter had been living in Australia and had not made a move in some time. She seemed nervous about being in front of the cameras again. By the mid 60s, her film career was virtually over and yet she was very upset when she found out that “that television actor” (me) was being billed above her! (laughs) But I didn’t arrange the billing…the William Morris Agency did. In the end, I deferred and let her have top billing. She was, after all, Eve Harrington. Who was I?
After I shot my scenes in England, I joined Anne and the rest of the cast in Trieste, Italy. The film was released in the U.S. on a double bill with a British spy spoof called Where the Bullets Fly, with Vittorio Gassman and Michael Ripper. Neither of the films was all that bad, but I believe there were some problems with money. There was a lien, perhaps, placed on all the prints which kept the movie out of theaters. Anyway…one more opportunity bites the dust. I did get paid, however, so it wasn’t a total loss!
JO’D: One of your best friends in Hollywood was actor Mark Damon (The House of Usher). You also became business partners with him for a time. Please tell us about your friendship and about the nature of your business association.
BR: I met Mark in 1960, right after he worked with Vincent Price in The House of Usher, and we hit it off right away. Mark had started out as a contract player at Columbia in the mid-1950s, and had achieved some success, but his publicist (and mentor) Helen Ferguson was convinced he could be the next Robert Taylor and got him signed to a contract at 20th Century Fox. He did a few films there (Between Heaven and Hell, Young and Dangerous, etc.) and became something of a teen idol before striking out on his own as a freelance performer in the early 60s. In 1961 Mark moved to Rome and began acting in Italian films. He is an extremely bright and hardworking guy with a Masters Degree in Business from UCLA. We decided to start a semi-production company in the 60s and we named it Ramon Productions. The name, obviously, was a combination of Ramage and Damon. I got top billing because if Mark’s name had come first it would have read Damage Productions, which wouldn’t have worked at all! (laughs)
Mark met his wife, an actress named Margaret Markov, on the set when he produced the Roger Corman film, The Arena. The picture also starred Pam Grier and it grossed millions. As I said, they lived in Rome and I was in L.A., handling the business from my end. Ramon Productions was a “dummy corporation” in the event that we wanted to option anything. We kept it going for a while and then Mark left to form Producers Sales Organization with a man named Jack Hyde. Mark went on to become a fine producer. He moved back to Hollywood in the late 70s and optioned Joseph Wambaugh’s The Choirboys, and then in 1982 he was the executive producer of The Boat (formerly known as Das Boot), which received several major awards. Mark and I remain friends and he’s still going strong. In fact, he released his memoirs in 2008, titled “From Cowboy to Mogul to Monster: The Never-ending Story of Film Pioneer Mark Damon”. Obviously, I can’t wait to read it!
JO’D: In the 1970s, you turned to producing a series of films for Encyclopedia Britannica. Tell us how that opportunity arose.
BR: A friend of mine who produced documentaries told the Film Division at Encyclopedia Brittanica about me, and they asked me if I would produce eight of these educational films for them⎯four on Dyslexia and four on Down’s Syndrome. Through a professor in the film school at USC I met director George Lucas who was just coming off his huge success with American Graffiti. He suggested I use film students from USC and The AFI in the documentaries, and so I did. I had a very low budget to work with and it wasn’t a profitable venture, but the films were beautifully done for their cost. Some of them, in fact, were eventually shown on PBS. I look at those eight educational films as my finest contribution to the industry. I think they made up for the less lofty work I did as an actor! (laughs)
JO’D: You knew the late film actor John Phillip Law (The Love Machine) for several years. Please tell us a little bit about him and your friendship.
BR: John was probably the truest friend I ever had in Hollywood. We knew each other for over twenty-five years and I was deeply saddened when he passed away in May of 2008. His former wife was the best friend of the late Virginia lumber heiress Lucy Haskell Hampton Barringer Yount, a very special person in my life. By the way, she was a real southern belle.
John loved to work and he continued making films right up until he died. Ironically, although he worked all over the world, he lived his entire life in the same house in West Hollywood, just above the Sunset Strip. John was a few years younger than me, but he was the kind of big brother I always wished my own brother had been to me. I miss him very much.
JO’D: Another longtime friend of yours is veteran film critic Robert Osborne, a popular host on the Turner Classic Movies cable station and a journalist for The Hollywood Reporter.
BR: There is no one in the world like Bob Osborne…his knowledge of Hollywood films is unparalleled! We met in January 1961 during rehearsals for a stage production of The Country Girl, with Vera Miles and Jeff Morrow, and we’ve been best friends ever since. Bob has worked hard and diligently to get to where he is today. He loves his present job at TCM, and I think it shows. He is a good and loyal friend, and he has the world’s best sense of humor. As you can see, I have been fortunate in my life to have always fallen in with a good lot!
JO’D: What was it like working with Bob Osborne, Vera Miles and Jeff Morrow in The Country Girl?
BR: It was wonderful, but also stressful and confusing at times. Teddy Hart, Lorenz Hart’s brother, and his wife Dorothy Hart (not the actress who worked at Universal in the 1940s) had bought and transformed a terrific little theatre into a luxurious regional Equity house. It had ninety plush red velvet seats and they named it Theatre 90. We rehearsed the play for several weeks before it opened. Vera was married to actor Keith Larsen at the time and she was about seven months pregnant. She had to drive in from the San Fernando Valley, and since I lived only four blocks from the theatre, I would meet her there at 6PM and lace her into a surgical corset so that she wouldn’t “show” too much on stage. Then, Vera would relax a little before the night’s performance.
On the morning of our opening night, Bob Osborne’s father died from a heart attack at age 60. Bob had been hired to do a bit part that same day in a movie for Allied Artists called Twenty Plus Two. The film starred David Janssen and Jeanne Crain and Bob played a sailor on leave in a bar scene with Dina Merrill. Despite his grief, Bob honored his commitment to do the film, but he had to miss our opening night for the play as he flew back to Spokane that evening to be with his family and to attend his father’s funeral. I know that was quite a tough time for him.
The Country Girl opened to good reviews. I played Ralph, the backstage dresser for Jeff Morrow’s character, Frank Elgin. Vera was superb as Georgie Elgin, the part Grace Kelly had played in the 1954 film with Bing Crosby. Of course, both women (Vera Miles and Grace Kelly) were favorites of Alfred Hitchcock’s. When we did the play, Vera had just finished the film Back Street at Universal with Susan Hayward and John Gavin. And about a year before that, she had done Hitchcock’s Psycho. Vera played in our production for two weeks before being replaced by Jeff Morrow’s wife, Anna Karen.
Actor’s Equity had very strict rules back then. I had been an assistant to the producers during the first rehearsals. The actor who had been playing my part up until the time I took over wanted to be paid for his work, but Actor’s Equity refused to pay him as he was not an Equity member. Bob’s replacement while he was gone was also non union (and he was terrible in the part, too)! When Bob returned to the show, however, he was paid since he was union. My part was later combined with the actor’s who played the stage manager in the play. I did not act in the show during the last two weeks but handled the box office instead. As a result, my name was not in the original program. Therefore, there is no printed record of my being in the show. (We didn’t print any new programs when Anna Karen replaced Vera Miles, either). Things like that happened all the time back then⎯mix-ups, snafus, whatever you want to call them. When they did, I just moved on the best I could.
I did another play for Theatre 90 when it presented Pal Joey a few months after we did The Country Girl. The lead was played by an actor named Tony Monaco, who had made the film Wait ‘Til The Sun Shines, Nellie at 20th Century Fox in 1952, and then the following year (billed as Tommy Morton) he did another musical called Main Street To Broadway with Mary Murphy. Pamela Mason, who had been hired for the role of Vera Prentiss Simpson in Pal Joey, walked off the stage the night of dress rehearsal in a contract dispute with the producers, and was replaced at the last minute by actress Holly Harris. (Holly had replaced Vivienne Segal in Pal Joey on Broadway in 1952.) My friend Edward Stevenson had just won the Academy Award with Edith Head for doing Lucille Ball’s clothes in The Facts of Life, and he was hired to do my clothes for the play. (By the way, Bob Osborne was supposed to be in The Facts of Life but lost the part to actor Dick Patterson, who was a close friend of Lucille’s).
My clothes in Pal Joey were tailored by Knize, Inc. in New York City. Knize was the best tailor in the world and our contract with them stipulated that my clothes had to be listed prominently in the program. So, my clothes were billed right below the cast! (laughs) Because of that, and Holly Harris replacing Pamela Mason, new programs had to be printed up immediately before the play’s opening. However, they were merely sheets of paper, not the Playbill, the official theatre program of Actor’s Equity. The new programs read: “Starring Holly Harris, Tony Monaco, Pat McNulty (a new starlet at the time), Teddy Hart (the producer/actor) and William Ramage.” And right after that, “Clothes for William Ramage coordinated by Edward Stevenson and tailored by Knize, Inc. of New York City.” How’s that for a neat old showbiz story? (laughs)
JO’D: Wow, you have such fascinating memories. You mentioned Pamela Mason. I know she was married for many years to James Mason, but I don’t know too much else about her. What was she like?
BR: Very colorful! It was actually through Pamela Mason that I met Zsa Zsa Gabor, who taught me how to cook Hungarian stuffed cabbage (a great recipe, by the way). I sat between Zsa Zsa and Diana Dors one night during dinner at Pamela and James Mason’s house⎯now that was fun! (laughs) Back then, the Masons lived at 1018 Pamela Drive behind The Beverly Hills Hotel. Pamela bought Buster Keaton’s old white elephant of a mansion on ten acres of prime Beverly Hills real estate. She later subdivided it and made millions of dollars on the deal! She was an heiress, you know, to an English woolens empire. As Pamela Kellino, she made some movies in England before she married James Mason. Her first husband Roy Kellino, a director, later married Barbara Billingsley, who, as everyone probably knows, was June Cleaver on Leave it to Beaver!
I met many celebrities through Pamela. Alas, she and her daughter, Portland (actress Portland Mason Schuyler), who was about 12 or 13 when we met, are both gone. So is James, of course. Portland played “the kid” in Pal Joey, but left the production when Pamela did. Pamela had a valid reason to leave, but it was still horrible of her to leave the night before we were to open! After that, Actor’s Equity never let either Pamela or “Porty” work in a union production again. Portland did open to great reviews in a show in London’s West End years later. Her career as an actress never took off, though. James and Pamela’s son, Morgan Mason, was very active in the Reagan administration and lived with actress Louise Fletcher as her lover for several years. She was over 30 years older than Morgan and Pamela was livid and hated Louise because of it! Louise, an Oscar winner for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, does a lot of B-films now. I know that Bob Osborne sees her sometimes when he is in Hollywood.
JO’D: Again, you have some great, great memories. I wanted to ask you if you ever wished you had done more acting, or are you glad that you concentrated more on your modeling career?
BR: Well, I always felt that working was the most important thing. That…and getting paid for the work! I was serious about acting but I didn’t care about billing. I didn’t want to be a contract player, nor did I want a TV series. I just wanted to work. I wanted regular, paying acting jobs. Alas, over time I learned that there were not that many available. So, modeling suited me just fine.
Things were kind of winding down for me in 1967, when I did an episode of the TV show The Iron Horse with Dale Robertson. We shot it in Calabasas in August and it was hot as hell. I played a railroad worker and I think I made 750 dollars for three days work. By then, I pretty much knew that my acting career wasn’t going to take off, and I was miserable.
I remember my very last day as an actor on a Hollywood set. It was in 1968 and I was at Universal doing an episode of TV’s Run For Your Life with Ben Gazzara. There were hot, Santa Ana winds blowing, and with the air conditioning in the building not working properly, the heat inside the sound stage was unbearable. I was playing a realtor in the episode and I remember I wore horn-rimmed glasses. My part was not very large and I was just kind of hanging out on the set one day. I looked around the sound stage, which was empty. Waiting around, in the hot light of the day, I thought, “What the hell am I doing here? I don’t want to do this anymore.” All those trashy extras…all the dust and dirt. I had nearly fifteen years of it, which was enough. I felt the magic was gone, and it was depressing. I remember I told that to Ben Gazzara, who by the way is a very nice guy…very professional. He laughed and said he knew the feeling. It was definitely time for me to go.
JO’D: Any regrets?
BR: Sure, there are some regrets. I never felt I lived up to my potential as an actor, but then again, so few actors do. On the other hand, I feel I accomplished a hell of a lot in the modeling industry. It was good, honest work and I’m proud of it. I made many friends in Hollywood and I learned a lot about life while I was there.
JO’D: You earned a doctorate in Law from Western State School of Law in Fullerton, Ca. in 1982 and passed the California Bar on the first try. Did you practice law?
BR: No, I never really intended to practice law. I went for two reasons…to learn more about the legal system and to exercise and improve my mind. I was almost 50 when I got my law degree. It helped me get a much higher salary during my years in the banking industry.
JO’D: What motivated your interest in banking?
BR: A friend of mine, Lon Harmon, a brilliant kid from Noble, Oklahoma, had started a Savings and Loan in Beverly Hills with twelve backers, who later became The Board of Directors. Lon was very successful and within ten years there were twelve branches of Progressive Savings and Loan over the Los Angeles County area. Lon offered me a job in Financial Services and I eventually became Senior Vice-President at Progressive. As you can imagine, this was a whole different world from show business and the modeling industry, but I loved it. In 1985, the financial association was sold, and the new owner hired all new executives. So, much like what had happened to me at RKO, I was out! Oh well…all good things come to an end.
JO’D: After living there for 30 years, what made you decide to leave Los Angeles in 1985?
BR: I would say that having no job and paying almost eighteen hundred dollars a month rent for a high-rise apartment on Wilshire Blvd. made the decision for me! (laughs) I tried getting another job and sent out resumes, but got no responses. I was 51 and learned the hard way that no one wants to hire older people. I guess it has to do with the cost of insuring older workers, you know? I had made some good investments over the years, but I had to find a place to live, preferably a small town where my money would go further (and last longer). So, I traveled for a while, and then I found a beautiful coastal town in the Pacific Northwest. I fell in love with it and have been here ever since. I have a little cottage on the beach by a lighthouse. I always promised myself that as I grew older I would read, listen to music, and relax…and that is exactly what I’m doing! I was in the Hollywood rat race for over 30 years. Trust me, banking in Beverly Hills required as much socializing as filmmaking. I love my solitude now. I have a few friends, and I am in good health. I’m very happy.
JO’D: Do you have a motto that you live by?
BR: Life can be a ball, so make it happen. If one has a dream, it should be pursued. I went after every one of mine, and I am grateful for the many blessings they brought me. God has a plan for all of us, but He also gives us free will. Always follow your heart, and be good to people. I would say that’s my creed. I’ve had a great life…and I have loved it!