Crane (6 page)

The process made the editor godlike. It was about control. A successful wrinkle-free joining of separate sentences or thoughts was exciting. My dad removed breaths, dead air, and verbal stumbles to create a coherent and concise package. I would watch and ask, “Why are you cutting from there to there?” He would say, “The second line is funnier and faster than the first line” or “You need a beat there, a pause, because it makes the answer funnier.” The results he achieved sounded seamless. Except for spotting the white edit tape rolling past the sound head, I wouldn’t have been able to identify where the edits were. Later my dad would cut half-inch reel-to-reel videotape on his Sony player to create “Best of Carson” reels—the funniest and most touching moments from Johnny Carson’s
Tonight
show. He created these for the pleasure of his dad and mom, who were always asleep by 11:30. My dad loved everything about the editing process: physically cutting the tape, splicing it, seeing the jokes come together. The times my dad was editing tape and film and making music were when I saw him at his happiest, most joyful, and most contented.

My dad received thousands of complimentary albums and singles from record companies promoting their latest band or artist. He would
bring home a new batch every week. Each album jacket had a little hole punched in the corner designating it as a demonstration copy that could not be sold. I would watch for him to pull into the driveway at night and help him unload boxes of new records: vocal, big band, jazz, comedy, and rock. When I first heard The Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out” single I played it a dozen times one morning before school. The back room was the best record store in the world.

My dad’s popularity on the radio brought other perks. I was a Beatlemaniac and on Sunday evening, February 9, 1964, had watched their U.S. debut on
The Ed Sullivan Show
along with 73 million other people. My dad took black-and-white Polaroids of their performance off the television screen, which I cherished for decades. I saw all three of their
Sullivan
appearances, and their album
Meet the Beatles
was played nonstop at my schoolmate Pete Walker’s make-out parties. I watched from the periphery as those progressive Encino girls gave long, soulful kisses to their steadies. I bought John Lennon’s book
In His Own Write,
which I found hysterically funny, and my cousin Sandra and I went to see
A Hard Day’s Night
at the Pix Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard three times in one day because the audience kept screaming through the movie and we couldn’t make out all the dialogue.

In August 1964 the Beatles were going to play the Hollywood Bowl. I felt I had to see them live and in person. My dad mentioned on his radio show that his son longed to see the Beatles at the Bowl and if any listener had extra tickets for the soldout show he’d buy them. A woman called KNX and said she had four tickets that she couldn’t use. The tickets were $5.50 each, and my dad, my mom, my aunt Bunny, and I were witnesses to the wild abandon of eighteen thousand young people and adults. It was a wonderful madness. To me, selfishly relishing the electrifying atmosphere of the Bowl full of Beatles, I realized there was definitely a plus side to my dad’s celebrity. I temporarily forgot the discomfort I usually felt about my dad’s fame.

Two summers later, my dad would make a call to the Wallach brothers, who were only slightly more than casual acquaintances. One brother was an executive with Capitol Records and the other ran the most successful record store chain in Los Angeles, Wallach’s Music City. The result of that phone call had Dave Arnoff and me sitting in the first row behind the visitors’ dugout at Dodger Stadium while our pals the Beatles took the stage set up at second base. This concert turned out to be their penultimate
live show. Arnoff and I sat as close to them as one could get in a stadium rock show. Forty-five thousand of us hung on every note, not realizing that the closest we’d ever get to seeing the Beatles perform live together again would be the
Let It Be
film of their impromptu jam from the rooftop of Apple Records in London in January 1969. And that was it. Though there were still several brilliant albums to come, the innocent joy that was Beatlemania was unofficially over. I felt a real sense of loss thinking I’d never see those carefree moptops together again.

*Dangerous Dan: “I’m so mad and sadistic, but most of all lovable. When Dangerous Dan comes, the girls always fall for him.”

5

Every four weeks, a new stage production opened at the warehouse-like Windmill Dinner Theatre at 10345 North Scottsdale Road in an unattractive commercial section of Scottsdale, which otherwise is an upscale Phoenix suburb. The productions were retooled Broadway dinosaurs or, in the case of Norman Barasch and Carroll Moore’s
Beginner’s Luck,
something that never got close to Broadway but somehow spoke to its leading man, my dad. He had made it his own vanity project, which he also directed, and he could recite the lines backward and forward. A cast of four, a couple of sets, ninety minutes, and time after the performance for the audience to enjoy a brief stand-up and autograph session with Colonel Hogan himself. These road warrior plays were fronted by former semistars like Forrest Tucker or Hugh O’Brian, who had had their bread-and-butter TV shows cancelled. The job could pay $3,000 to $5,000 a week, but the dinner theater circuit was about as far out as one could orbit show business and still technically be in it. Showbiz-wise, Scottsdale dinner theater was just beyond the rings of Saturn.

Apartment 132A at the Winfield Apartments complex a few miles down the road reflected just how far an actor or actress on the marquis had fallen. Instead of staying at the Arizona Biltmore, Hotel Valley Ho, or the Royal Palms, the star was supplied a nondescript sedan to get him or her from the warehouse to a cramped, dark, two-bedroom rental with a tiny kitchen in a lackluster group of buildings that could be part of any inner city. Parking spaces were not enclosed. There was no security. Many of the residents at the Winfield complex knew the comings and goings of their new neighbor, Bob Crane, aka Colonel Hogan. This was life off, off, way off Broadway.

I saw waves of heat rising from the blacktop as our car slowly moved down the driveway toward apartment 132A. There were no medical examiners, no crime scene investigators in jumpsuits, no yellow crime scene tape, no barriers for the crowds—and in fact, no crowds. There was no press, no field reporters jockeying for position, no flashbulbs blazing. It could have been the scene of a domestic disturbance on just another hot summer day in Scottsdale. As Officer Vassall led our party into the apartment, I was surprised there was nobody else there.

My dad’s body had been removed in a zippered bag before my arrival. It had been wheeled across nine hundred square feet of cheap carpeting and wafting cigarette smoke through the open front door and onto the sizzling pavement where the medical examiner’s vehicle idled, waiting for the return trip to the morgue.

The apartment had a cheap 1950s feel. There was JC Penney artwork on the walls, flower-print bedspreads, a plaid couch in the living room, a brass lamp on a pressed-wood end table. The cavelike space resembled a mad scientist’s lab or a crash pad for a down-and-out rock group doing one-nighter club gigs. The place was trashed—a whiskey bottle and Booth’s gin on the kitchen counter (I had only ever seen my dad drink two screwdrivers during an evening out at a club, and he never drank at home). There was a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray full of cigarette butts (my dad never smoked), mail, magazines, newspapers strewn about on the couch and coffee table in defiance of a tall, silver kitchen trash can, car and apartment keys, shirts, pants, shoes on tables, couch, and floor throughout as well as pool towels, suntan lotion, swim trunks, and a videotape containing an edited version of
Saturday Night Fever
sitting stacked in the hallway.

Dominating the small living room was the video equipment. It was mostly RCA and Sony products. There was a television monitor on a moveable stand, a three-quarter-inch video cassette recorder placed on top of the monitor, a metal shipping case standing vertically with “BC fragile” stenciled on one side that supported a VHS video recorder connected to a large, blue video camera with a carrying strap mounted on a metal tripod, a Beta video recording deck, stacks of Zenith videocassettes, AC power boards supporting a spider’s web of wires, cables, attachments, converters, and adapters. I picked up three-quarter-inch videotape boxes. I touched the video camera that was mounted on a tripod. I opened my dad’s travel case for the cumbersome videotape deck.

Vaughn, Goldstein, and I walked through the apartment, examining, touching, handling items in plain view of Vassall. We added our fingerprints, footprints, and hair samples to an already contaminated, lackadaisically investigated, casually considered location of a human being’s last being. This was a murder scene.

Later I found out that when I had called my dad’s apartment earlier that afternoon Victoria Berry was surrounded by Scottsdale Police Department officers and detectives as she played personal secretary. She was smoking as she answered the phone. Crime scene contamination was already well under way.

Berry had had an appointment at 2:00 at my dad’s apartment to rehearse her scene in the play. When she arrived the front door was unlocked. The apartment was dark despite the bright Arizona sun outside. She whispered, “Bob?” There was no answer. She raised the volume. “Bob?” She looked in the bedroom and saw someone in the bed. The face and hair were so matted with blood Berry was unable to say whether it was her costar. She went screaming from the apartment and got a neighbor to call the police.

As I walked through the apartment I peeked in the spare bedroom. It didn’t look as though it had been occupied anytime recently. In one of the bathrooms, a portable darkroom was set up, using the tank lid and toilet seat cover as workspace. There were strips of negatives containing thirty-six exposures hanging from the towel rack.

I walked down the narrow hallway and stopped just outside the doorway of my dad’s bedroom. I didn’t have any idea how to prepare myself for the actual murder scene. I turned ninety degrees to face the reality of it head-on. The lamp, nightstand, dresser, and generic paintings all had the transient feel of a motel that changed its occupants daily. What a lousy place to die, I thought. I had to keep reminding myself that this lifeless place didn’t represent my dad.

A pair of eyeglasses, pocket change, and an open calendar book with “meeting with Victoria Berry at 2 p.m.” marked down for the day sat on the nightstand. The investigators had stripped the bed of its sheets. The bare mattress reminded me of the Japanese flag—a large red circle surrounded by white. On the wall behind the head of the bed was a dervish-like blood splatter that showed, on closer examination, brain tissue. I felt I needed to see this. I had to bury my nose in this sad, sad, anticlimactic set piece. I had to register how the smell of that overflowing ashtray and
those half-empty liquor bottles permeated the drapes, the tacky carpet, even the walls themselves. I felt it was my duty to be my dad’s ambassador to the living, to report back to the troops on the home front accurate descriptions of the battlefield I was witnessing.

After walking those fields, I had to see my dad. I wanted to make sure that he was really dead. I couldn’t rely on the announcement of his demise from a source I didn’t know, didn’t trust. My dad, my best friend, had been taken away, but I needed confirmation. I had to see it with my own eyes.

My only experience with shocking tragedies like this were those played out on the news at night, safely removed from reality. “Poor SOB,” I’d sigh, and reach for a beer. Television created a safe distance between tragic events and the sanctuary of your own living room. I had for many years watched the 11:00 news during the Vietnam War, and Tom Brokaw, who was the local NBC anchor during those dismal days, often started his broadcast with the body count from Hue or Da Nang or some other hellhole. I would think about the guys out there, guys my age dying in a miserable misadventure and of the grief of their families back home, but the pain they must’ve felt was always unimaginable to me. Not anymore.

There had been unanticipated death in my family before, such as my grandfather’s, but nothing so horrifically
wrong
as cold-blooded murder. I was staggeringly ill prepared for this. I had no background, no experience of any kind to help me deal with it.

To television fans it was the death of Colonel Hogan; to my family—a son, a brother, an uncle, a cousin, a former husband. To my sisters and me, our dad. It felt final and unfinished at the same time.

We left the crime scene. On my way out I took a six-pack of beer out of the refrigerator. That was another item that was out of place for my dad. He never drank beer. But it was going to be a hot night in Scottsdale. I figured it was also going to be a long one. The police officer in the apartment watched me take the beer and said, “Yeah, that’s fine. Go ahead.”