Crane (36 page)

When shooting began, Stone took less than an hour to get what he wanted from John and company. He signaled the end of John’s participation on the project by thanking him for his work on the film. John shook hands with the cranky Tommy Lee Jones and with Oldman, who mentioned he had a week off and was headed to Los Angeles. John said that he was headed there as well and suggested Oldman travel as his guest on the private jet hired for the trip.

I sat quietly in the back of the plane watching Oldman and Candy, long-standing members of the actors’ club, become fast friends with each refill of their Waterford crystal glasses. They sat side by side in the empty (except for me) Gulfstream. Oldman was making short work of the Scotch, while John had his usual rum and Cokes. The hours flew by, so to speak. With the alcohol on continuous flow, as we neared Los Angeles Gary and John had formulated a plan to create a production company for serious films and live Shakespeare in the park, with John as Falstaff and Gary doing Macbeth. Alas, Uncle Buck and Sid Vicious no more forever!

After we landed at Van Nuys Airport, the new best friends were poured into their respective limousines and headed off, each in his own direction, into the Southern California summer night. John never saw or spoke to Gary Oldman again.

In addition to his full schedule as movie star, John added a new role as a minority co-owner, along with hockey great Wayne Gretzky and L.A. Kings’ king Bruce McNall, of the Toronto Argonauts, his hometown’s Canadian Football League team. Aside from his million-dollar investment in the team, John took it upon himself to promote and resuscitate the ailing CFL, which boasted eight clubs, two of them unimaginatively nicknamed Roughriders. John made personal appearances across Canada from Vancouver to Ottawa. His investment of time and legwork began to pay off. Attendance at CFL games picked up (“Hey, there’s Uncle Buck!”), and aside from an occasional D battery hurled his way, the self-styled CFL ambassador felt like a kid again.

During the middle week between Kari’s chemo installments, the “normal” week, if Kari had the strength and felt well enough, she would
join John and me in Winnipeg or Calgary or Toronto. But for the first and third weeks of the cycle, she was benched. So while I was in Regina or Edmonton holding John’s hand, I had very mixed feelings. I was away from my ailing wife, but I was holding down the fort financially. My employment with John freed Kari from working unless she wanted to. The downside was the many days we spent apart. At least Kari never called me a failure again.

Canadian football consumed the rest of 1991. John was enjoying his role as CFL ambassador. It was a Cinderella year for his Argonauts. They went on to win the Grey Cup, the Great White North’s version of the Super Bowl’s Lombardi Trophy. John seemed to make his million-dollar investment back many fold in terms of fan excitement and the smiles he generated on the faces of locals, who enjoyed John’s presence at all the games.

It was also in 1991 that John left his agent, John Gaines, and APA, and hitched his wagon to another Hollywood icon, former Rat Pack publicist turned agent Guy McElwaine at ICM.

With
Camp Candy
canceled and
Radio Kandy
’s plug pulled after proving to be an expensive hobby for John, Frostbacks’ employees began to fall by the wayside. The few of us who remained metaphorically set up sandbags in the Frostbacks Bar and Grill, trying to protect our leader while watching for friend or foe to enter through the main doors. Mostly we watched McElwaine, on his way home from somewhere, draining the bar’s beverages with John, weaving tales of Old Hollywood, promising work, and delivering none.

35

On May 29, 1992, deputy county attorney Myrna J. Parker, one of Richard Romley’s top lieutenants, filed a complaint signed by Judge David R. Cole of Maricopa County Superior Court charging John Henry Carpenter with first-degree murder. The trigger for the indictment was the photographs of Carpenter’s rental car’s interior passenger door. These, long forgotten by police, investigators, and prosecutors until Jim Raines rescued them from a county courthouse storage room, provided medical experts in Texas and New Mexico with a glimpse of a one-sixteenth-inch speck of human tissue that they determined to be brain matter.

At 6:10 a.m. on Monday, June 1, 1992, Carpenter was arrested in Carson, California, on his way to work and held without bail at a downtown Los Angeles jail. Later that morning, Romley announced, “We will be presenting some new evidence that maybe [Hyder and Collins] did not have the opportunity to present.” Carpenter’s attorney, Fleischman, told the
Arizona Republic
and the
Los Angeles Times
that he was “shocked [again] at the paucity of evidence,” calling the details outlined in the complaint filed against his client “old soup.” Romley refused to speak about specifics in his team’s findings and conclusions, while Fleischman was already testing his personal wiggle room with “How can you [the D.A.’s office] sit on this for fourteen years and expect this man [Carpenter] to defend himself?” Carpenter’s wife of thirty-seven years, Diana, weighed in with the press as well: “It’s only because Bob Crane was a TV star that this whole business has dragged on.” She very well might have been right. In the meantime, Fleischman had some other pressing problems to contend with. His “wrongly suspected” client in a homicide case had waived extradition to Arizona, but before he could take his free trip to the desert Southwest there was one other little matter that had to be cleared up. John Henry Carpenter was also the defendant in a child molestation
case in Long Beach, California. He was ordered held until that case was resolved.

On the peaceful morning of June 1, 1992, I was staying with John at his farm in Queensville, forty-five minutes north of Toronto. The fresh country air was intoxicating as I sipped my coffee on the patio. John was in the middle of an unplanned hiatus. His agent, Guy McElwaine, had not been able to find work for him. The film industry was going through yet another upheaval, sifting through its roster of actors and actresses, embracing the up-and-comers, deciding what to do with the ones who didn’t do
boffo biz every time out. John loved to work. He had always worked. Inactivity brought out his insecurities.

Into that climate we received a phone call from Arlene Brownstein back at the Frostbacks office that there was a breaking story on the front page of the
L.A. Times.
Brownstein read aloud that the new district attorney of Maricopa County, Arizona, Richard Romley, had decided to finally arrest and arraign John Henry Carpenter for my dad’s murder—fourteen years after the crime. Reporters were calling the office, and Brownstein wanted to know how to handle them. I was baffled that anyone knew Bob Crane’s son worked for John Candy. John’s insecurities vanished instantly because he now had a project: protecting me. He told Brownstein, “Tell anyone who calls to contact Skip Brittenham.” Ziffren, Brittenham & Branca, attorneys at law in Century City, handled clients on the magnitude of Michael Jackson. Brittenham put together rapacious contracts for superstar performers, producers, and directors. I doubt he was in the habit of taking phone calls on behalf of the likes of me, slain
Hogan’s Heroes
star Bob Crane’s kid. Nonetheless, Brittenham’s office would be acting as my surrogate for a while because his client had asked a favor. It was another case of John empathizing with the little guy, me in this case, and taking immediate action to solve a problem and make the unfair world right again.

From June 2 forward, the “Man Held in Crane’s Death Was a Suspect from Day 1” (
Los Angeles Times
), and my dad’s case occupied print space in newspapers from the
New York Post
to the
Chicago Tribune
to the
San Francisco Chronicle
and air time from
Entertainment Tonight
to KNXT 2 News in Los Angeles, but it was the so-called supermarket tabloids, “the rags,” that really had fun with the breaking developments—the
National Enquirer
(“
Hogan’s Heroes
Fans Help Cops Solve 14-Year Murder Mystery”), the
Star
(“
Hogan’s Heroes
Murder: Shocking Inside Story—Tragic TV Good Guy Bob Crane”), and the
Globe
(“At Last! Police Zero in on Murderer of
Hogan’s Heroes
Star”). The
Arizona Republic
brought levity to the indictment, the positives and negatives of the charge condensed into a headline—“Key to Crane Case Just a Speck.”

36

One of the more important lessons in work ethic I learned from John was to follow up and follow through. When he got an idea, he’d start calling actors, writers, and producers to help him make it a reality. John would act like the project was a “go” from its inception. The project might be anything, from a script like “Hauling Ashes” with
Cops
producer John Langley to an
SCTV
one-off special for NBC. John would move on the idea with such conviction that anyone on the other end of the phone would already be checking
TV Guide
or
Entertainment Weekly
for the release date. He liked self-generated movement, not wanting to wait for a producer to call. Initiating his own material equated work with the enjoyable task of bringing creative artists together for a common goal. He was good at that. For every ten strikes, maybe one would catch fire. That positive stance greatly influenced me, the freelancer at the mercy of editors deciding when, where, or if an article would appear.

Kari and I had a finished draft of “Suburbia Blues,” and I worked up the courage to show John the script. Kari and I thought he would be hilarious as the put-upon loser husband. I handed the folder to John, who looked at the title page. “Hey, when did you guys do this?” John asked.

“We’ve been working on it for years,” I said, looking at the ground. “We think you’d be great for the lead role.”

John set the folder on a mile-high stack of scripts. That was the end of it. At that moment it dawned on me that giving John Candy homegrown scripts was not part of my job description. I was there to perform many functions, for which I was being paid, and paid well, but script development was not one of them. I vowed not to forget that, and I promised myself I wouldn’t bother John about the script again.

That was until the day I was talking on the phone to his television agent, Alan Berger, at ICM, regarding John narrating an episode of
Shelley Duvall’s Bedtime Stories
(“Blumpoe the Grumpoe Meets Arnold the
Cat”). With that bit of business taken care of, I got a bolt of testosterone-enriched lightning that strikes occasionally and asked Berger, “Alan, may I show you a script? I think it would be perfect for Frostbacks.” I pitched it not as a John Candy lead role but as production fodder for Candy’s company.

Alan said, “Yeah, send it over.”

I felt a bit guilty about pursuing this particular Hollywood Dream behind John’s back, but I was certain John and Frostbacks Production would be the chief benefactors.

A day later, I received a call from Berger’s office. “Bob, we love the script. What do you want to do?” Alan asked.

He was nowhere near as excited as I was. I said, “John’s got a copy. It would be great if he could be in it, but that’s between you guys. I’ve always thought it was a project for John to be involved in.”

I transferred Berger’s call to John’s office, and then I quietly called Kari to let her know that, at least, we were at bat. I hovered in the hallway outside John’s office while Berger repeated what he had told me—a couple of people at ICM had read the script and loved it. I peeked around the corner and saw John frantically searching his desk for such a hot property. After a few minutes, I got the gist of their conversation—“Suburbia Blues” was not big-screen material, but it would be perfect for a TV movie.

In those early ’90s, CBS and NBC both had a movie of the week. John had a relationship with NBC because of
SCTV
and appearances on
Saturday Night Live, The New Show,
and David Letterman, who was still at 30 Rock at the time. Berger pitched NBC on a John Candy movie of the week, and NBC jumped on it like a hanging curveball. The only problem, and it was no small hurdle, was that John was not convinced that he wanted to be in a TV movie. Television movies of the week were for Barbara Eden or Robert Urich or Richard Chamberlain, not someone starring in Hollywood multiplex fare directed by A-listers like John Hughes, Chris Columbus, and Oliver Stone. John had served his time on the small box and wasn’t of a mind to go back to it.

Then I had another flash of inspiration. “John, why don’t you direct it?” I suggested.

John swished that idea around like a fine pinot noir. He’d never directed before. But every actor wants to direct. He loved the idea.

There was a flurry of meetings at NBC Burbank. We acquired a new production partner in Stan Brooks, a veteran television movie producer.
There were rewrites. Then there were more meetings. Then some more rewrites. Kari and I thought we were the new Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. After six months, the person at NBC in charge of TV movies was fired, and that had an immediate trickle-down effect on us. The new regime had a different focus on what they wanted to do with their movies. They wanted important, Emmy-nominated products—not John Candy goofiness. We were cast adrift. But not for long.