Crane (22 page)

I introduced the program’s two regulars: movie reviewer Desly Movius, who did a sardonic take on
Alien,
talking about Sigourney Weaver running around in her knickers, and Diane Haas (yes, my Diane Haas, now living in New York), who filled in ex–New Yorkers, traveling New Yorkers, and wannabe New Yorkers on what was happening in the Big Apple. The hour zipped by. There were tons of laughs. Brian Doyle-Murray threw in the occasional barb while a stoned Doug Kenney giggled and Chevy rained hilarity. All I had to do was hit the cues and get out of the way.

Even after that first hour with Chevy it was still a constant battle to enlist sponsors. No one listened to a program in that ungodly timeslot. Even the steakhouse in Beverly Hills sizzled out after two weeks.
The Robert Crane Show
died as quietly as it had been born. I don’t know who took my place the Sunday after the fourth week. Probably the station manager’s mother humming show tunes. We were not missed.

I’m glad I did it, though, for all the hats that I wore on it. Most of the ventures in my life were either created or cocreated by me. And because those phone calls offering you your dream job don’t actually come, I had to create my own product and my own market. I never got that phone call from Sony. I never got that phone call from Paramount. Michael Ovitz never called saying he had to have me to package his next big project. Bob Evans never called to say he wanted to make
Second Morning After
into a sidesplitting hour and a half. I’m sure he just misplaced my phone number and has been kicking himself ever since.

*Belushi had the number one film,
Animal House;
the number one late-night TV series,
SNL;
and, with Dan Aykroyd, the number one album,
The Blues Brothers
.

23

As the ’70s drew to a close, the interest in my dad’s murder case seemed to diminish exponentially. As far as district attorney Charles Hyder was concerned, the Scottsdale Police Department investigation led by Ron Dean and Dennis Borkenhagen had failed to produce enough compelling evidence to lead to an arrest and trial of John Henry Carpenter—or anyone else, for that matter.

It was just a pity there was no Columbo to winkle out the facts, no Barnaby Jones to put two and two together, no Joe Mannix to swoop in in his Olds Toronado and save the day. The Scottsdale Police Department didn’t even have an Andy of Mayberry to piece together the puzzle. What they did have was lots of Barney Fifes.

Tom Collins would assume the role of district attorney in Maricopa County during the inauguration of the Reagan ’80s, but by then the case was colder than a morgue slab. Officers, detectives, investigators, and medical examiners had moved on. The Scottsdale PD was anxious to put this blighted case behind it. One investigator who hadn’t moved on was county deputy attorney Larry Turoff. Although he proclaimed that the attorney’s office, in its latest review of the case, couldn’t find “anything new that could lead to an arrest,” he stressed that the case was not closed. But there wasn’t much optimism about a break in the case. I had about as much expectation that the Scottsdale Police Department would solve my dad’s murder as I did that the Beatles would get back together.

I was still stumbling emotionally. As far as the public was concerned, my dad was ancient history, but I was still having moments when I thought I’d pick up the phone to call him, only to be shocked to remember he was dead.

Nowadays when tragedy is still warm people talk about “closure.” I haven’t got any idea what that means, thirty-seven years on. If you lose someone you love, you never have closure. You keep him alive in your mind and your heart. His spirit ignites every time you think of his smile, his laugh, or his hand on the back of your neck. His existence has meaning because you make it meaningful with your own existence. There’s a grave marker on Page and Eloise Smith’s grave in northern California that reads, “It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.” Loving mortal things is what makes us human. I don’t think we ever “close” that door.

Many of my evenings were spent sitting by the Jacuzzi at my mom and Chuck’s house in an old terrycloth bathrobe watching the lights come up in the Valley as the sun slipped behind the Santa Monica Mountains. Never much of a social animal, I had become all the more reclusive because I felt myself to be a drag on any kind of gaiety and an easy target for cheap attempts at humor. Once, handing my credit card to a waiter at a local restaurant, I was heckled with “You’re Bob Crane? I thought you were dead.” I also had an old acquaintance sidle up to me and ask out of the blue, “Your dad took care of you, right? You get
Hogan’s
rerun money, don’t you?” Even worse, a bar patron, overhearing me talking about my dad to a friend, butted in, with no mock shock, “You mean Colonel Hogan’s dead?”

To which the bartender replied, “Wasn’t he a TV guy or something?”

And even the bar back joined in: “Yeah, what was the name of that show he was on?”

I said loudly, “Can I get another beer?”

Twenty-nine years old and my dad, my dear dead dad, was still making it hard for me to walk into or out of rooms. Then again, maybe it was just my own paranoia. Looking back on it now, it seems a bit solipsistic to think that people would be so focused on me. From my vantage point now, I want to tell my twenty-nine-year-old self to get off his ass. And I did try, giving myself a change of venue.

After Playboy had produced
Oui
for a few years, the magazine’s monthly sales numbers were nowhere near those of the company’s flagship publication, and Hefner’s lieutenants stoked doubt about the whole venture. Hefner caved and off-loaded
Oui
to a New York consortium, which moved the operation from the glitz of La-La Land to the grit of Eighth Avenue in Manhattan.

The new editor was Dian Hanson, late of
Puritan
and
Juggs
magazines, who could have, and should have, been the star of a European film about the sexual revolution. She was a free spirit, so open about all matters carnal that the only person I could compare her to was my dad. What a couple they would have made. Hanson was from Seattle, my age but decades older in life experience, living with a biker/tattoo artist and now overseeing the Playboy cast-off. As the sale and transfer between the two companies was occurring, Hanson visited Los Angeles to clean up some of the loose ends. She had read and liked my interviews and articles in the magazine, caught wind that my dad was the murdered actor Bob Crane, and gave me a call to ask for a meeting. The rendezvous was in her motel room on Franklin Avenue near the Hollywood Freeway on-ramp. We talked about the new direction
Oui
would be taking; she thought Hefner was a fossil. Within minutes of saying hello, Hanson asked me to be a contributing editor. My writing career was taking a giant leap forward. To seal the deal, she propositioned me and we jumped into the sagging bed. I felt as if I were making love with an uninhibited pleasure seeker, but Hanson was just the new-age ’80s professional woman—fucking and working was the same release. No need to sign on the dotted line. Sex was the new handshake, and I knew she and I would never make love again.

I was one of the few writers to make the hump from Hefner-era to post-Hefner
Oui. Oui
magazine instantly became a dim memory to the board of directors at Playboy. I didn’t care. I was moving to the Big Apple. “Hey, Ed Koch, how’m I doin’?”

I bought a trunk, loaded up some clothing and my trusty tape recorder, and moved in with newlyweds Chris Fryer and Desly Movius at their one-bedroom apartment on West Seventy-first Street off Central Park. I was one block from John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Dakota enclave. Chris and Desly graciously allowed me to sleep on their rollout couch while I acclimated.

My first day on the job I took the subway south from Seventy-second Street and Central Park West to the
Oui
offices at Forty-third Street and Eighth Avenue. With no Miss Any Month in sight, I shared the one grimy elevator with characters that made Ratzo Rizzo look like an aristocrat. At the magazine’s fifth-floor office I stepped through the door into a poorly lit and unkempt atmosphere featuring a small ensemble of art and copy editors working alongside advertising personnel, who all talked out of the sides of their mouths like Buddy Hackett. All that was missing was a
troupe of grizzled men hovering over a fire in an open oil drum. Yet another Fellini Excursion. People moved between offices, doors closing ominously behind them. I immediately got the impression that activities way beyond the production of a men’s magazine were taking place behind those doors. Hanson greeted me out of the gloom and introduced me to some of the resident troglodytes. She proudly handed me the first issue of the new
Oui.

When Playboy owned the publication, the paper quality and color separation were top notch. It was slick. The magazine I now held in my hands was a piss-poor relative—the photographs were grainy, the color separation bled, it was badly printed on subpar stock. In my mind I could hear the former Los Angeles staffers erupting in laughter, thankful that they hadn’t moved a trunkful of clothes to sleep on a hide-a-bed and work in the publishing equivalent of a roach motel. I studied one nude layout and stopped short of asking Hanson for a pair of 3-D glasses. And yet, the magazine was still a viable publication. People were buying it—and I had a job.

Regardless of the sales figures, the publicists for the Bruce Derns, Chevy Chases, and Karen Blacks kept turning us down because of the atrocious look of the book. Whoever said, “Any publicity is good publicity” hadn’t seen the new
Oui.
My office space was perfectly in keeping with the look of the magazine. It was grim. There was no privacy. There were refugees from the parole board moving about the space doing god knows what. I was now fielding calls from representatives of “celebrities” like Louisa Moritz and Pamela Sue Martin. The magazine was becoming a joke, not even a shadow of its former self. As much as I enjoyed being in New York, after a couple of weeks I knew this enterprise was doomed. I had made a terrible mistake. I loathed spending time at
Oui
’s hellhole offices.

I approached Dian and shared the news that I was not meant to be a full-time employee in an office situation. I was a freelancer at heart and much more comfortable in the field. She expressed disappointment but said she understood. So after an educational two weeks, I abandoned Chris and Desly’s couch and hauled my trunk and my ass back to Southern California. On the flight home I was already rehearsing comeback lines to the inevitable razzing I would receive from my sisters about not being able to keep a job. But I still continued to write for
Oui.
I contributed pieces like an exposé on the rampant lesbianism among female golf professionals
called “Ladies to a Tee” and an interview with ’50s survivor Terry Moore regarding her relationship with Howard Hughes. I’d turn in the work and patiently wait to get paid. I could never guess when the check would arrive, or if it did, if it would even be good. Once, after I’d made numerous requests to be paid for an article, I received a check written on an automotive shocks and transmission company check. I’m not kidding.