Crane (47 page)

Leslie and I attended the lavish
Hwy 111
launch party in Palm Desert.
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was on everyone’s mind—either they couldn’t wait to see it or they were avoiding it like an STD. Weiner was pleased with the Q&A and ordered a series of articles with luminaries who’d gone to the great press briefing room in the sky. For my part, I was thrilled. I was writing, I was making money, and the best part was I didn’t have to deal with the talent’s publicists or attorneys.

*See
appendix C
, “Robert Crane’s Letter to Sony Pictures Classics Legal Department Addressing
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script, 2002.”

*See
appendix D
, “Robert Crane’s Piece for
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Website, 2002.”

*See
appendix E
.

45

Life was full. I was conducting and writing interviews every month during 2003 for either Rezek at
Playboy
or Weiner at
Hwy 111.
At the highly competitive
Playboy
I captured seven of the twelve “20 Questions,” my best year ever. I had pieces run with Juliette Lewis, Rachel Weisz, and Nicolas Cage, among others. In addition, I had half a dozen more Q&As with long-gone luminaries for
Hwy 111,
including tête-à-têtes with Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and John Wayne. I really liked interviewing dead celebrities; they were easy to work with, and they never griped about the finished product.

I loved my wife. Leslie took 2003 off, retiring from the hellish hours of television production after Meagan threatened to throw her pager in the toilet. I was making enough for Leslie to relax and refuel and to spend her days guiding her newly teenaged daughter.

Meagan and I stepped lightly around each other, trying to find inroads, connecting points. She had a father, whom I would never attempt to upstage. I tried to give her a sense of logic, planning, and an awareness and consideration of other human beings by example. I loved Meagan because she was part of Leslie, but I didn’t always like her. It was sometimes very tough going—she was thirteen and thought she knew everything there was to know—but Leslie’s levelheadedness, decency, and dedication kept us together as Meagan and her parents continued to opt for the weekly visitation plan.

At the end of 2003, John Rezek was unceremoniously booted from the hutch after three dedicated decades at
Playboy.
The hierarchy came up with the brilliant idea of moving the editorial offices from Chicago to New York, where all aspects of running the magazine would cost more. Rezek wouldn’t uproot his family and move, but the fact was that a new regime of high-mastheaded editors had taken over and felt it was time to clean house at the money-losing publication. I eked out two more interviews
for the magazine—
Friends
costar Matthew Perry and
Star Trek
spin-off actress Jolene Blalock—before I, too, was cut loose. It was never done officially, but I would pitch thirty or forty names with no response, no assignment. Sometimes some of those pitches turned up in the pages of the magazine interviewed by someone else—someone more connected to the new editors, someone younger, someone hipper. Get the picture, old-timer? Over the twenty years that I contributed to
Playboy,
I conducted forty-five “20Qs” and wrote dozens of other articles, none of them, however, as fun, interesting, and unique as my interview with Koko. I often wonder how my dad would have reacted to his kid contributing to Hefner’s empire. Besides being amused, his reaction would probably have gone something like this: “Bobby, who’s Rachel Weisz? God, look at the tits on Miss July.”

I continued to contribute interviews and humor pieces to Stewart Weiner’s vision of a glossy, upscale monthly for another year until it turned into roadkill on Highway 111. For every Hefner, there were a thousand Weiners.

Leading any kind of creative life involves reinventing yourself periodically or running the risk of turning into a fossil, so I reinvented myself as a writer of books, working with Dave Thomas on
SCTV: Behind the Scenes
and alongside Chris Fryer on grizzled veteran actor Bruce Dern’s candid, gossipy autobiography,
Things I’ve Said, but Probably Shouldn’t Have.
That project alone took us two and a half years to complete. It spent one whole week on the
Los Angeles Times
Bestseller List. It was a good thing that Leslie had a new steady job.

I dedicated myself to work and family, but one day it ominously occurred to me that all was too quiet on the post–
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front. Five years had passed. The Patti and Scotty camp was mysteriously silent. Inasmuch as
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enjoyed constant pay-television showings, the initial prurient interest surrounding Patti and Scotty’s website had crashed, their self-published photo scrapbook was stillborn, and the pulpit chat room was strangely silent. A few weeks later a friend told me to check an item on the Internet, and there it was: “Sigrid Valdis, 72; Sexy secretary on ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ married its star. Lung cancer. Patricia Annette Olson Ateyeh Crane, twice-widowed, died October 14, 2007, in Anaheim, California, at daughter Ana Marie Sarmiento’s home.” Ana had begun as Patti and my dad’s housekeeper and nanny for Scotty. She had apparently been adopted by Patti. Why was Patti with Ana? Where were Scotty, her
daughter Melissa, her daughter-in-law Michelle, her five grandchildren, her sister Dale, and brother-in-law Hans Gudegast, aka Eric Braeden?

In a related piece Scotty was quoted, “
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was a strain for her [Patti], and she was in and out of the hospital quite a few times for stress-related illnesses. … Two years after the movie was released she was diagnosed with lung cancer.” I turned off the computer and sat staring at the wall. It was the end of something. The memories came fast: a father straining unsuccessfully to make two disparate families one with virtually no support from any of the participants; Patti, a woman so unlike my mom, playing the older sister I never had, captivating me with stories of the Rat Pack and sleeping with half of Hollywood; Patti’s growing jealousy, distrust, and intolerance of my dad’s side of the family evolving into a poisonous cauldron of ill will that destroyed whatever it was that held their marriage together; Patti’s insecurities driving her lust to be right all the time; my dad’s constant appeasement, resulting in the sacrifice of his loosely held principles; my losing respect for my dad not just because he had become a slave to his own desires but because he allowed Patti to become his slave master; Patti’s fear of losing her last blood relative and disciple—Scotty—and therefore having to rewrite her own history; creating the fiction of reconciliation; Patti playing the victim of my dad’s penchant for pornography while simultaneously being the archivist and purveyor of it.

Now it was all over, packaged in a nice, neat paragraph in the newspaper. After all the years I’d debated with myself over who killed my dad, it didn’t matter anymore. With Patti’s death it felt as if I’d sloughed my final skin. Patti was dead. Carpenter was dead. My dad had been dead almost thirty years. Who killed him? Had Carpenter done it in a fit of rage at being cast off? Had he done it as Patti’s henchman because she’d planted some demon seed in his not too sophisticated brain? Had Patti done it herself or hired a mob hit, providing the door key she’d most likely lifted from the apartment on her impromptu visit? Certainly it was one of those scenarios, but none of it mattered anymore. I had a new skin, shiny and vibrant and clean, and the debate about the murder was finished, as dead as the principals.

Patti slid into the sunset with the knowledge she had moved my dad up from “unfashionable” Tarzana to trendy Westwood, from lying low in the dust bowl of Oakwood Cemetery in Chatsworth to rubbing elbows with his idol Jack Lemmon and former costar Donna Reed at Westwood
Memorial Park Cemetery, from the simple plate that read “Robert E. Crane, 1928–1978” to a grotesque monument of Tinseltown and bad taste that announced, “Hogan and Hilda Together Forever,” with Patti and my dad in character etched into the stone. The image of Patti shows her wearing Hogan’s hat. Other engraved lowlights include: on the left, “Bob Crane aka Col. Hogan Star of Hogan’s Heroes 1965–71 nee Robert Edward Crane, Father of Deborah, Karen, Ana Marie, Robert Scott Crane” and an autographed publicity still of my dad as Hogan reading, “I adore you Patty—647-646 Your Bob”; and on the right, “Sigrid Valdis aka Hogan’s Hilda—Mrs. Bob Crane nee Patricia Annette Olson, Mother of Melissa Suzanne, Ana Marie, Robert Scott Crane” and a publicity still of Patti wearing a low-cut dress. Her own poetry completes the shrine: “Wild wheat against the sky / Once young now brown and dry / All signs of life are gone / Yet in still Earth the roots live on. Patricia Crane ~ Humanist.” This final commemoration typifies the distorted remembrance of the distorted relationship between my dad and Patti. That relationship would have died had he lived, but lived because he died.

I wear my omission from Patti’s monolith as a badge of honor.

46

After my dad’s murder, one of the things I spirited away from our Midvale Avenue apartment was the uniform he wore on
Hogan’s Heroes.
Comprised of a khaki shirt, leather jacket, and that iconic hat (which will live forever slung insouciantly over the spike of Colonel Klink’s Teutonic helmet in the
Hogan’s
end credits roll), the outfit was mustered out of service in 1971 after the show’s unexpected cancellation.

Apart from a few post-
Hogan’s
publicity gigs that my day did in character, he never wore these garments again, and after I liberated them from his bedroom closet, they were relegated to the dark confines of the hallway cupboard at my mom and Chuck’s home. I would from time to time retrieve the suit bag from its nearly forgotten recess, unzip the long zipper, take the jacket off its hanger, and have a deep sniff. Was it my dad’s smell? I couldn’t remember, but the history of 168 episodes of
Hogan’s
wafted alluringly as I filled my nose with its scent and my mind with a kaleidoscope of emotions and memories as I touched the fabric. These reunions usually ended with me mumbling, “What a waste,” and zipping everything back into its sarcophagus.

One afternoon, shortly after my dad’s funeral, I got a call from Patti regarding his
Hogan
’s hat. She spun a long and tender tale about how much Scotty loved that hat. She asked if I knew anything about its whereabouts, and while I knew admitting I had the chapeau might easily trigger a SWAT team bashing in the front door, the generous part of my nature caused me to say, “Tell Scotty he can have the hat.” Many fans of the series would argue that the hat best symbolized the whole shebang, but as I’d done with Kari’s clothing, shoes, and accessories, I let it go. I don’t know if the story about Scotty wanting the hat was even true.

I remained the custodian of the jacket and shirt, and in late 2001, when I met with Greg Kinnear, who was to become my dad for seven weeks during the filming of
Auto Focus,
I offered him the use of them,
gratis. I did it because I greatly approved of the casting of Kinnear as my dad (and I think he would have as well). I was pleased that after Frank Sinatra and Bob Crane, the jacket was worn by another actor I respected. Since my family never discussed
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or, except for me, even saw the film, I felt using my dad’s clothing was a moot point as far as they were concerned. I felt joyful just knowing it would appear on camera again. Like his predecessors, Kinnear filled the jacket perfectly, no alterations required.

The
Hogan’s
garb meant different things to different members of the family. For my mom it symbolized her ex-husband, the father of her children, and the mostly good times they’d had together. For Debbie and Karen it was more emblematic of a difficult and trying part of their lives, when their father became a weekend visitor. For me it brought an amalgam of delight and sorrow, the memories of spending my aimless teenaged summers camped out in a German POW camp mixed indelibly with the gnawing sadness that the laughter was now hollow and decades old.

My wife, Leslie, enjoyed trying on the jacket one day as she regaled me with stories of being a young
Hogan’s Heroes
and Bob Crane fan growing up in Santa Rosa, California. Her memories brought a smile to my face, but the good cheer quickly evaporated. As I retired the jacket and shirt to its mothproof garment bag again, my heart told me it was time to say good-bye to these symbols of my dad’s success, a success that was beyond everyone’s expectations, and to a time when my family was still a family.

One morning as Leslie and I left the office of our Beverly Hills internist, Dr. Joe Ruiz, I spied a building just down the street on North Camden Drive that was adorned with Christie’s signage. “Hang on a second,” I said to Leslie, and I ducked into the building. I asked the receptionist a few questions about Christie’s auctions. When I inquired about television memorabilia, I was directed to Christie’s Pop Culture Division, headquartered in Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan.

I had sold things in the past, ranging from license plate frames to celebrity interviews. The only emotion ever connected with those commodities was my satisfaction as I cashed the checks. But the
Hogan’s
shirt and jacket had a history with my family, and I wondered if divesting myself of them might mean losing the mixed emotions associated with them. Still, I felt I was the appropriate person in our clan to make the decision to shed these items, just as I had been the one to go to the murder scene all those years ago. If it had been put to a vote it would probably have
broken down like this: my mom not equipped to bid a final adieu; my sister Karen against the sale, wanting any profit for herself; my sister Debbie, still angry with my dad for what she perceived as his favoritism toward his new family, a true believer like me that it was time to let go.

“Your father’s uniform is an iconic piece of television history,” said Simeon Lipman, Head of Pop Culture at Christie’s during our initial telephone conversation. “My colleagues and I would be delighted if you would entrust Christie’s with the sale,” added Candra Gilcrest, an associate of Lipman’s. I got a sense of elation and recognition from all the Christie’s personnel I was in contact with during that spring of 2009. Colonel Hogan was not forgotten, at least not by people who were about to make a buck off him.