Crane (3 page)

In the summer of 1956 my parents reached California and saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time. They stayed at the Malibu Surf Motel, on the inland side of Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. It’s still there today. My folks liked what they saw in Los Angeles. They liked the weather. No chains needed to keep the Olds on the road in the winter. Everyone
seemed to have a swimming pool or know someone who did. They met with Bob Sutton, a pleasant man with a Gorbachev-like birthmark on his face, who would become a father figure for my dad. My dad was excited by the unending possibilities that L.A. offered to his career. What’s more, my parents sensed in Los Angeles a new freedom, a shaking loose from the conservative customs and button-down rules of the East Coast. They decided to make the move. The downside was that they had no family on the West Coast and only one acquaintance from the East, my mom’s longtime friend Rose Curcio. But they decided it was time to leave the smallness of Bridgeport, Beardsley Park, Morokses Hamburger Stand, and WICC, time to explore the relative newness and social lawlessness of the wild, wild West.

My dad signed the KNX deal for $50,000 a year, pretty big money in 1956. My parents rented a three-bedroom home with a small yard on Fulton Avenue in Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley. They drove back to Connecticut, and, like returning astronauts who have walked on the moon, they tried to explain to the tethered family what this new terrain looked like, what life might be like without snow and humidity, that houses could be constructed not to look like minimum security prisons, that orange trees were not only real but ubiquitous, that the alien from
The Day the Earth Stood Still
hadn’t destroyed city hall after all.

My parents got out of their apartment lease, and my mom and I temporarily lived at Nan’s house, while my dad packed up the Olds and drove across the country a second time to start his new job. My mom said sad good-byes to family and friends, and I said good-bye to my five-year-old girlfriend. We took a train out of Grand Central Station in New York City bound for Union Station, just blocks from the not disintegrated Los Angeles City Hall. I was excited because I had never taken a trip beyond New Haven. The mother and son journey gave us the opportunity to see new things together even though our transcontinental track took us through some of the worst parts of the country, the hairy backsides of every major and minor city and town. Mom was leaving the daughter and sister roles to star in the mother and wife roles while she prepared for her newly created celebrity wife role.

A few days later our train pulled into Union Station. I was in Los Angeles for the first time. There was excitement abounding, but there was no Dad to meet us. My mom and I walked through the crowded depot along with the other settlers. We made our way out to the curbside. Still
no Dad. Mom had two phone numbers for him—KNX and the house on Fulton Avenue. He couldn’t be reached at either. My mom, alternately disappointed, angry, and sad, hired a cab, and she and “the little man” lit out for the Valley, where a much different life awaited us.

3

Transcribing tape requires lots of breaks. A little past 3:30 p.m. on June 29 I had to leave the apartment to pick up my grandmother, my dad’s mom, and take her out to Tarzana in the San Fernando Valley to visit my mom, Anne, and stepdad, Chuck Sloan. Chuck and my mom had been married for five years. Chuck was an only child and had no children of his own, though he had previously been married for twenty years. He grew up in Boyle Heights, East L.A., when it was a white neighborhood. High school graduate. Air force, stationed in Tampa with stays in both Kansas and Greenland. His father had died at sixty-nine; his mother was deaf and in a care facility. His cousins, the Worthingtons, were his main family. When he married my mom, he took on a new lot of relatives—three children, me and my two younger sisters Debbie and Karen; an ex-husband, my dad; my mom’s ex-mother-in-law, Rose; and my other grandmother, Nan, his mother-in-law. His dance card was full, but Chuck was ever buoyant. A salesman with a contagious smile, he first sold television sets, then stocks, then single-family houses, which is what he was doing when he met my mom. Our family’s house in Tarzana had become too big and carried the taint of my parents’ divorce, so my mom had visited the Braemar development in the hills of Tarzana with an eye to downsizing the family abode.

Chuck ran the sales office, and though my mom didn’t buy a new house from him, she did find a caring, patient man. A physically diminutive figure at five six, Chuck is nevertheless always a dominant presence at any gathering through his wise advice or his commanding silence. He seems ageless, with his hair thinning and turning gray just now in his eighties. He looks like he could be Bob Newhart’s younger brother.

So I was taking my dad’s mother out to visit her ex-daughter-in-law and present husband. Relations between Rose and my mom had cooled after my parents’ divorce (Rose took her son’s side, of course), but, now,
years later, everyone had become friendly again. We pulled up in front of my mom and Chuck’s house, a comfortable one-story, three-bedroom with a million-dollar view of the Valley that Chuck designed and built three years earlier.

“Bobby, get in here,” Chuck yelled in an uncharacteristically harsh tone.

I hustled in, leaving my grandmother to be greeted by my mom, Nan, and my sister Karen. I usually had genuine laughs with Chuck, but clearly this was not going to be one of those times. Creases formed between his eyebrows as he said abruptly, “Call Lloyd Vaughn.”

Vaughn was my dad and stepmother’s business manager and was currently involved (with attorney Bill Goldstein) in negotiating their divorce settlement. I dialed his number.

“Bobby, there’s a rumor your dad has been shot,” Vaughn said unemotionally. “Bill and I are going to Phoenix. Do you want to come?”

Hearing the perfunctory announcement in Vaughn’s businesslike voice made me feel staggered and hollow at once. The shock of Vaughn’s words was otherworldly. I had no experience to draw from to deal with them. Mechanically and unthinkingly I said, “Yes, I’ll go.”

I hung up and told everyone in the room. Rose shrieked. Instantly, other voices cried out. “Oh, my God.” “I can’t believe this.” Chuck and I looked at each other. He’d stay home while I went to Phoenix.

I drove to Burbank Airport and met Vaughn and Goldstein, who had booked the flight to Phoenix. They were concerned personally as well as professionally—they considered themselves friends of my dad. They sat next to each other on the flight talking, even laughing. Their hour flight went quickly. Mine, not so much. I felt isolated.

I played out a thousand scenarios in my head. How could my dad have been shot? By whom and why? He was an actor, for God’s sake. What did it feel like to be shot? How many times? What part of his body was hit? Where did it happen? When? In the middle of the day? Sleepy Scottsdale was a bedroom community, for chrissakes.

The pilot informed us that it was 110 degrees in Phoenix. We were met at Sky Harbor Airport by Barry Vassall, a Scottsdale Police Department liaison. As we drove into town, Vassall turned to the three of us and announced, “Gentlemen, I’ve got to inform you that Mr. Crane is deceased.”

Vaughn, Goldstein, and I looked at each other. Their expressions mirrored
my own reactions, alternately vacant, angry, and incredulous. I reviewed my dad’s life in milliseconds—his upbringing, family, friends, coworkers, one-night pickups, first wife, divorce, second wife, second divorce in progress, career. My self-centered life tipped from thinking about my next date and which movie I was going to see to my dad’s abrupt and permanent exit. Handshakes, hugs, smiles, laughter—they were all just memories now. In the blackness, the door had shut behind my dad. There was no possibility of a good-bye. I would never speak with him again.

How the hell could this have happened?

4

I was five when we moved to California, so I started school in the City of Angels. The highlight of my six-month tenure in kindergarten at Dixie Canyon Elementary was seeing a kid come to school one day in his pajamas. “Wow. We’re not in Connecticut anymore.”

It was the three of us as the little family unit. My dad was doing his morning show as well as 250 luncheons a year all over his Southland listening area where he would speak and do his comedy routine using his tape recorder. Those appearances were all done gratis as an opportunity to promote both his radio show and himself. For instance, when the Culver City Chamber of Commerce had its annual luncheon at the Elks Lodge, my dad would be there as the emcee. He’d do ten minutes of stand-up or just appear as a special guest. “Let’s give a warm Culver City welcome to KNX’s new morning man, Bob Crane!”

His routine consisted mainly of stories he told on the air, like the time he asked everyone in the San Fernando Valley to mail in ten dead flies to help clear up the Valley fly problem—the postmaster in Hollywood was not amused. Sometimes he would follow his own material with a punch line lifted from one of the many comedy albums of the day featuring Jonathan Winters, Stan Freberg, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Shelley Berman, or Bob Newhart. At the beginning, he used a great deal of Jonathan Winters because he thought Winters was hysterically funny, though bordering on clinically insane. My dad would set up a story or joke, press the “play” button on the tape machine at the luncheon or drop the needle on a vinyl record in the studio, and the recorded voice would deliver the punch line—“I love you” or “Chicken fat and booze.” Or he would use a sound effect of a building collapsing
or an automobile accident. My dad called these voices and sounds “gimmicks.”

When my dad had guests like Jerry Lewis or Nichols and May in the studio, they would tape original lines and songs that he could use later in person or on the radio. For live events, my dad would lift the vocal track or sound effect off a vinyl record, transfer the bit to quarter-inch reel-to-reel
tape, physically cut the tape using a razorblade on a metal edit bar, and then use white stick ’em tape to butt the two heads of tape together. He knew exactly where each voice or effect was on the tape and what he would have to say to lead up to the payoff. Most audience members at those Chamber of Commerce and Elks Lodge events had a couple of drinks in them at lunch and were looking to have a good time, some laughs. This is how Southern California and Bob Crane met in person.

The downside of all those luncheons for my dad was that he gained a fair amount of weight that year because of all the rubber-chicken/rich-dessert affairs. After a year or so, he cut back on the personal appearances and shed the extra pounds. My dad also became a walking Thomas Guide/GPS for Southern California—Eastside, Westside, Valley, South-bay, Orange County. It starts to sound like a Randy Newman tune.

The dog and pony show, as he called it, helped to establish his name. Anybody who listened to Los Angeles radio in 1956 soon became aware of Bob Crane. He was the morning man on one of the leading radio stations in the second-largest media market in the United States. He was now part of the Tiffany Network—CBS. When his show ended at 9:55, after national and local news, Arthur Godfrey, another hero of my dad’s, was on the air from New York. Pat Buttram, who would go on to
Green Acres
fame, had a show on later in the day. My dad’s chief competition on morning radio was a longtime Los Angeles staple, KMPC’s Dick Whittinghill, who presented a less manic drive-time show, a no-gimmicks, less hip, more traditional production in terms of the music he played and his sense of humor.

My dad defied the popular description of a disc jockey because he did more than just spin Top 10 records. He did comedy, interviewed celebrities, played mainstream music, and applied his gimmicks to the lifeblood of the show—commercials. Most company men enjoyed his playful jabs at their products, though some did not. The sales executives at Hertz got a kick out of their “We’ll put you in the driver’s seat” ad followed by the sound effect of a loud car crash, whereas the hierarchy at 20th Century Fox did not appreciate its sixty-second spot promoting “a new kind of thrill sensation,” the critically reviled western/horror feature
The Fiend Who Walked the West
starring Robert Evans, ending with a hail of machine-gun fire.

My dad was in a studio by himself except when he had guests in the 9:00–10:00 hour. On his left he had one turntable for vinyl, a cabinet
containing the gimmicks, his records, and a partial drum set (snare, hihat, cymbal), and on his right two more turntables. He wore a horse collar with a microphone on it so he could swivel in his chair, stand up and reach for a record, sit down, turn around, drum, and not be stuck with talking into a stationary microphone. Straight ahead of him in another room behind glass was his engineer, Jack Chapman, who was a bit older than my dad. He played the music and the commercials, which were on both vinyl and cartridge tapes. That was the setup. There was a lot of pointing—“Go!” “Cut!”—there were intercoms, station employees, ad men, and visitors peering into the studio through porthole windows. Chapman and my dad had great communication with only sporadic minor disagreements. My dad was twenty-eight years old in 1956, and he and Chapman were an odd couple, my dad loud, freewheelin’, and improvisational, Jack buttoned-down and monosyllabic, but they worked really well together. Chapman was a great engineer because he anticipated my dad but never second-guessed him.