Crane (21 page)

“I was at my father’s apartment, my apartment, our apartment at 634 Midvale Avenue, West Los Angeles, probably fast asleep at that point.”

“Were you by yourself?”

“Yes,” I said, and that was that. I guess I was never a serious suspect because no one ever asked me again about my movements or whereabouts.

The DA’s office always thought that Carpenter was the killer, but just didn’t have enough evidence to pin the murder on him. This was well before DNA testing. The police had the blood sample from Carpenter’s rental car, which he returned on the day of the murder, but although it was the same blood type as my dad’s, they couldn’t say conclusively that it was my dad’s blood. They also had a few other suspects who may have had motives: some faceless Mafiosi from Chicago, a couple of irate husbands
and boyfriends of strippers and cocktail waitresses in different cities. And, of course, there was Patti.

In that summer of 1978 Lloyd Vaughn had told me, “You’re going to see some money out of this,” meaning my dad’s death. Possibly that was supposed to be a very lame attempt to console me. I recognized that people are uncomfortable with death, and maybe even more so with grieving survivors, but the notion that money would be a palliative to me seemed insensitive, even considered in the best light.

Vaughn, who was my dad’s business manager, already knew that my sisters and I had been cut out of my dad’s will by virtue of the codicil that he had drawn up, supposedly for my dad and Patti. The cynical conspiracy theorist in me questions the authenticity of that codicil, especially since Patti and Lloyd were on exceedingly friendly terms, particularly when my dad was out of town. Maybe my dad never even saw the codicil, let alone signed it. Maybe Patti had an inkling that something bad might befall my dad. The codicil was her way of protecting her interests, since she alone benefited from his death. Maybe she made a few phone calls to contacts she might have had from her days with the rat pack and arranged for some heavy-handed gorilla to slip into my dad’s apartment, with a key she might have provided, while he was sleeping. Who knows? Maybe Patti was also on the grassy knoll.

It turned out the money I received was an insurance policy that my folks had set up for me at Mass Mutual when I was a little kid. After my dad’s death it was cashed out for $6,000. That money and a couple of pieces of electronics from the apartment were the sum total of my inheritance.

I took that money and immediately invested it in making a short film called
The Second Morning After,
which was written by Chris Fryer. I wanted to direct. I wanted to expose film. I had made movies in eight millimeter, Super 8, and sixteen millimeter, but it was time to play with the big boys and shoot in thirty-five millimeter. So with that $6,000 I rented a thirty-five-millimeter Mitchell camera, dolly, a bank of lights, and some sound equipment. I hired Ray Nankey, a cameraman who also doubled as editor. I also hired a soundman, a couple of actors. It was “Lights, camera, action.”

The Second Morning After
is an eight-minute comedy about a middle-aged couple on the honeymoon morning of what is the second marriage for both. The shoot went well, though Shepard Menken, the actor playing
the husband, broke his leg a few days before we started. We had to reblock all the scenes to keep his thigh-high cast out of the frame. Even eight-minute films are not without their challenges.

In the fall of 1978,
The Second Morning After
opened at the United Artists theater in Westwood, on the bill with
The Big Fix,
which was the latest star vehicle for Richard Dreyfuss. As I had done with an earlier short I’d made with Rick Decker called
Mirage,
which played at Westwood’s National Theatre with
Dog Day Afternoon,
I would often go to the theater and just stand in the back, listening for the laughs, and then leave the cinema before the feature film began.
Second Morning After
was up for Live Action Short Oscar consideration but didn’t make the final list of nominees.

In a way my dad had made the production possible, and I think he would’ve gotten a couple of laughs out of the film. But if I’d bought six grand worth of Disney stock in 1978 I’d be a millionaire today. That’s life.
As my friend Dave Diamond always says, “If I had some ham, I could have ham and eggs, if I had some eggs.”

I was just trying to get a handle on where the hell I was headed. I knew I didn’t want to be an actor or in any public aspect of show business. I knew I wanted to write. I wanted to be behind the scenes. I wanted to create stuff, provided I wasn’t seen or known visually. I never wanted to be recognized on the street because of all the experiences I’d had with my dad and how uncomfortable it had always made me feel.

Even the most well-meaning fans—and there are a lot of good people out there—interfere with the living of life. I didn’t want any of that. Dad was always comfortable with his celebrity. He enjoyed it. At a ballgame, I’d seen him set down his “Dodger dog,” wipe the mustard from his hands, and miss a great catch while he cheerily autographed a fan’s program. The same program that probably went out with the next week’s trash.

22

A year after my dad’s murder, I attempted to do something I’d never had the cajones to do while he was alive—host my own radio show. Operating under the one star per family theory, and with fear of my dad’s criticism and skepticism now out of the equation, it was time, not to be a star—I had no interest in that—but to reexperience the creative outlet I had enjoyed as a kid, being on the radio, being in a windowless room with a microphone and nobody looking at you. I set myself the challenge to produce, book the guests, sell advertising time, and front a show on a Los Angeles outlet. FM was out of the question as most stations were still musically oriented—rock or easy listening. AM was an uphill battle because it fell into two major categories—talk and all news. Talk was ruled by KABC, with the white Michael Jackson as its leader, and the 24/7 (though no one said 24/7 yet) news was led by my dad’s former station, KNX, which previously had been all entertainment. My dad and I shared a love of extracting information from people, of interviewing celebrities. I did it for magazines—why not do it over the airwaves?

Since I was a no-name radio entity with a short interview résumé, I lowered my sights considerably and found a mom-and-pop station called KIEV (which decades later assumed the call letters of L.A.’s rock ’n’ roll dinosaur KRLA) in Glendale, east of the San Fernando Valley. The sad-sack stucco, single-story office complex on San Fernando Boulevard housed a five-thousand-watt station that played a hodgepodge of entertainment programs along with a bit of news and talk. I approached the hardened station manager, who had heard and seen every two-bit “artist” walk through his dirt-streaked glass front door. I did my pitch of why Robert Crane would be an asset to the station. I could offer my vast stable of celebrity “pals” from my magazine Q&As who would like nothing more than to spend their afternoons in Glendale. I did not mention my dad. The outcome was I was allowed to rent an hour of airtime on Sunday
afternoons. It was quite possibly the worst timeslot on the worst radio station in Southern California, but it was a win-win for KIEV: the station was earning money for an hour of dead zone. I had to come up with $400 a week for at least the next four weeks, at which time, if my head was above water, I would continue with my exercise in vanity.

The one problem I might not be able to overcome was how to get Angelenos, who on Sunday afternoons are out at sporting events, the beach, or in the backyard barbequing, to tune their car or transistor radio dials in on a station with about as much pop as stale Rice Krispies. The prospects reminded me of my dad’s old joke: “My show got a minus two rating—no one listened, and two people knocked it.” Nonetheless, I welcomed my own challenge, recalling stories from my dad about “just doing it,” initiating the momentum and not waiting for the phone to ring. It might never ring. No one helped my dad get work on the radio. In fact, his family discouraged it. “Get a real job, Bob” was the cry of his father and brother, the Willy and Biff Loman of Stamford.

As long as I didn’t scream obscenities over the airwaves, the station was fine with whatever I wanted to do. As far as it was concerned, the KIEV ledger showed plus $400 even if the only people in L.A. listening were shut-ins and illegals peeling onions in restaurant kitchens.

My girlfriend at the time, Lori Otelsberg, hit the pavement with her youthful enthusiasm and sex appeal, and enticed several owners of small businesses to buy commercial time on the show. I also got a tip and branded a steakhouse on Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills for a few sixty-second spots at seventy-five bucks a shot. I was almost three-quarters of the way to covering my nut for the first week.

The next step in my Sisyphean labor was to book guest number one. Who was one of the hottest stars in show business? Chevy Chase. He also happened to be the
Oui
magazine interview subject I’d been working on at the time of my dad’s murder, so it seemed appropriate that he be my first celebrity guest. It kind of closed a circle for me.

The
Oui
interview had hit the newsstands in early 1979. Chevy became the first star of
Saturday Night Live,
bolted after just one season, had his own special for NBC, and costarred with Goldie Hawn in his first studio hit,
Foul Play.
Everything he touched turned to gold. How about lending his Midas touch to Sunday afternoon radio, being a non-prime-time player for an hour? I called his publicist, Jasper Vance, and made my plea. Chevy and Vance had been pleased with the magazine piece because
Chevy felt that it was the first interview that not only got his words right but accurately translated his brand of humor (“I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not!”) to print, which was not an easy undertaking. He had thanked me for holding up my end of that job. Plus, his given name was Cornelius Crane Chase. How weird was that? Was this six degrees of separation? Who knew? Who cared? He hadn’t even worked with Kevin Bacon. Chevy agreed to be on the first segment of
The Robert Crane Show,
set to debut July 1, 1979.

Bobby was back behind a microphone after a twenty-year hiatus. I had an engineer who played the prerecorded commercials, reviewers, comedy bits, and our upbeat theme “Teen Town” by Jaco Pastorius and Weather Report. Although we were light years from NPR, I was shooting for an arts and interview program, a kind of
Time Out America
live from Glendale.

Chevy, behind the wheel of a black Porsche 911, pulled into the weedy, empty parking lot accompanied by Brian Doyle-Murray, older brother of Bill, who was a writer-performer on
Saturday Night Live
at the time. Also in tow was Doug Kenney, who was instrumental in the development of
National Lampoon
magazine and one of the writers of the ridiculously successful
Animal House.
I saw that film a month after my dad’s death with Diane’s younger sister, Kris, who was trying to lighten things up for me by providing a dose of John Belushi, reigning king of all media that summer.* The reason Chevy was with Murray and Kenney was that they had just finished a round of golf in preparation for their film
Caddyshack,
which has become iconic not because it’s that great a film but because of the cast, which includes Chevy, Bill Murray, and Rodney Dangerfield. It was
Animal House
on the links.

The theme kicked in, and it was immediately three against one. I thought I would have enough problems just going one-on-one live with Chevy, but Doug Kenney severely challenged my concentration as he tossed a plastic bag of marijuana onto the table where the microphones stood. He rolled a spliff the size of a Louisville Slugger, leaned into his microphone, took a deep hit, and blew the smoke across the cramped studio, offering me a toke just seconds into my brand-spanking-new, uphill-battle, off-hours attempt at emulating my dad. I declined on-air—“No, thank you”—failing to disclose to the tens of listeners that chaos had overtaken my program and I was already losing control. Chevy was having fun listening to a couple of his best sketches from
SNL,
including the classic with Richard Pryor where he interviewed Pryor for a sanitation worker position using word association. He read the commercial for my Beverly Hills steakhouse, stretching the succinct sixty-second copy into three minutes, injecting myriad ways to prepare meat and baked potatoes. The spot has to rank as the cheapest and most hilarious celebrity ad of all time.