Crane (8 page)

After numerous test audience screenings, CBS felt that
Hogan’s Heroes
was going to become one of its most popular new weekly series.
The strong buzz emanating from CBS programming executives traveled crosstown to Madison Avenue and the all-important advertisers, who in those days sponsored entire episodes. General Foods bought up commercial time and planned to use
Hogan’s Heroes
cast members to sell Jell-O.

Filming began in June 1965. My dad would go live on KNX at 6:05 in the morning, finish at 8:00, drive to Paramount or Culver City, depending on the three-day shooting schedule, and film all day and often into the early evening. Sometimes stunts involving tanks, trucks, and even airplanes would take the filming late into the night. My dad taped the 8:00 to 9:55 segments of his radio show at night after filming
Hogan’s
or on the weekends for the upcoming week. My mom, sisters, and I saw so little of him during the filming of the first eight episodes he was known as “Uncle Daddy” at our house.

CBS publicity created an onslaught of television, radio, and print ads for the show. Satirist Stan Freberg created a radio campaign:

Freberg: “So, can we say if you loved World War II, you’ll love
Hogan’s Heroes?
”

Crane: “No, we better not say that.”

Visiting the set became de rigueur for General Foods, Philip Morris, and Madison Avenue executives. There were also visits from American film master John Ford and English pop invader Dave Clark. There was a sense of fun in the air on the set as well as, more important, a scent of success.

For my dad, this was a long way from “Voice of Disc Jockey” on
The Twilight Zone
and a million light years from his small bedroom, consumed by a full drum set, at his parents’ Stamford, Connecticut, house. These could have been heady times for him, but there were no spare minutes to consider the changes afoot as the fame factor invaded our lives over the next few weeks.
Hogan’s Heroes
and KNX ate up his days.

Reluctantly, my dad met with Bob Sutton, who ran KNX and had hired him nine years earlier, to announce that he physically could not continue performing both jobs. Sutton took it well; like everyone else at KNX, he had heard nothing but great comments about the television series, not to mention the Freberg radio commercial spots for the show, which were running on the air all the time. Besides, CBS owned KNX so my dad wasn’t abandoning that family.

My dad was on his way to being Jack Lemmon, but he wouldn’t have minded being Buddy Rich or Louie Bellson either. He wasn’t in the Rich
or Bellson category, but he was a pretty damn good drummer. He had started out playing in his high school band at Stamford High, which is where he met my mom. She played the glockenspiel. He went on to play timpani with the Connecticut Symphony Orchestra for a while but was bored by it. His goal when he was a teenager was to be in the big bands, playing with Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, or Stan Kenton.

At fifteen I put together a rock band with two friends, Dave Arnoff and Ron Heck. We were a power trio. Ron played lead, Dave was on bass, and I played the drums. I used my dad’s spare Gretsch drum set that he had at home for the band, but I was only a fair to average drummer. I could keep the beat and sing on key, but I couldn’t do any of the pyrotechnics
that my dad could. Ron Heck always impressed me because he played the same type guitar, a Rickenbacker, that Jim McGuinn of the Byrds played, except Ron was left-handed, and Arnoff was a great character because he had the longest hair and the oddest demeanor, a kind of Dylan meets Hendrix persona.

My garage band days coincided with the beginning of home video for my dad. He would bring out the new Sony camera and video deck, half-inch tape, reel-to-reel, and make videos of our band playing in the living room.

It was the mid-’60s, with all the craziness over the Beatles, the Byrds, the Stones. I loved what was happening. I loved the English invasion—the Kinks, the Animals, the Zombies. I thought I was going to be a rock musician for about five minutes, not knowing anything about what it took to get out of the living room and get a real, paying gig at the Troubadour or the Whisky A Go-Go or Gazzari’s on the Strip.

Toward the tail end of my dad’s KNX show in the summer of 1965, when he was doing double duty performing on the radio and shooting
Hogan’s
at the same time, I was with him one evening at the basement entrance to the radio building at Columbia Square. Suddenly we were surrounded by five longhaired guys as my dad was trying to find his keys. I was slyly looking at each of them in turn as my dad finally got the door open. We let them into the building, and they headed to the Columbia Records studio as we took the elevator up to my dad’s office.

“Dad, do you know who those guys were?” I asked.

“No, Bobby, I don’t.”

“That was the Byrds.”

“Who?” As much as he knew about music, he didn’t follow what was happening in rock ’n’ roll.

The Byrds had just come out with the
Mr. Tambourine
album. David Crosby, Jim (later Roger) McGuinn, Gene Clark, Michael Clarke, and Chris Hillman. I had been standing there in the presence of greatness.

Two years hence, the Byrds’ “So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star” would address lazy wannabes like me. It’s one thing to play in the living room with your buddies, and another thing to get out in the trenches. We did have a few gigs—a birthday party at somebody’s house in the hills above Tarzana, the Corbin movie theater before a Saturday matinee, and a bar mitzvah at a restaurant in Encino called the Queen’s Arms—but my rock stardom ended with a ten-minute jam of “Hava Nagila.”

My dad’s farewell KNX morning show aired August 16, 1965, a month before
Hogan’s Heroes
debuted. It was a “Best of,” where he played his favorite interviews and music, drummed to a few tunes, and rattled his sponsors one last time with his witty, bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you gimmicks. He was thirty-seven years old, late for emergence as an actor, but perfect for the role of Colonel Hogan.

Hogan’s Heroes
became an instant popular hit with its debut at 8:30 on Friday night, September 17, 1965. The series would finish number nine in the Nielsen ratings for that first season. Although many critics liked it, an equal number thought the show was in bad taste. It was, for them, still Nazis with a laugh track. Some critics felt World War II was still too fresh for comic treatment. The war had ended just a scant twenty years earlier. Compounding the issue, when
Hogan’s Heroes
premiered, some members of the press misunderstood or misconstrued the premise of the show, confusing a prisoner of war camp with a concentration camp, and took great umbrage. The editors of
TV Guide
remain offended to this day, calling the show one of the worst series in television history.

But
Hogan’s Heroes
takes place in a POW camp housing American, French, British, and other Allied soldiers. They are performing heroic deeds behind enemy lines. Some critics and viewers just didn’t see it, or couldn’t see it, or perhaps didn’t want to see it. I concede that maybe the memories of World War II hadn’t receded sufficiently. Interestingly,
M*A*S*H
appeared twenty years after the Korean War, and both the movie and television series won nominations and awards because, in between golfing, sipping martinis, and smoking marijuana, the medics kept expressing how awful war is. The critics loved it!

The war in Vietnam has spawned a lot of drama—
Platoon, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Drive, He Said,
and
Coming Home
—but Hollywood has never found any humor in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Maybe one day we’ll get the wacky and zany hijinks of “Ho’s Heroes.”

The truth is that the producer of
Hogan’s Heroes,
Edward H. Feldman, and many of the directors, writers, and cast members were Jewish. Robert Clary, who played LeBeau, was in a concentration camp. He had a number tattooed on his forearm. The actors who played the Germans—Klink, Schultz, Burkhalter, and Hochstetter—were all Jewish. They caught the humor and cashed the paycheck. Werner Klemperer, a real liberal, won two Emmys playing the befuddled camp Kommandant, Colonel Klink, even while he spent much of his free time protesting against the Vietnam War.

The San Fernando Valley, where my family lived, and which many of L.A.’s Westside residents already viewed as foreign soil, supported the third-largest population of Jews in the world after Israel and New York City. During the High Holy Days in September or October, my high school was a ghost town. The reason I mention this is to point out that some of my Jewish classmates were heavily influenced by what was obviously being said at home. That sometimes put me on the receiving end of looks of disapproval, disappointment, or anxiety. “Hey, that’s the kid whose father’s in the show making fun of concentration camps. Get him!” I felt like there was a swastika tattooed on my forehead long before Charlie Manson thought of it as a fashion statement.

I had been in love since the third grade with a girl named Karen Nudell, the smartest, cutest girl in my class. In fact, when my parents were searching for a name for my youngest sister, they settled on Karen after I suggested it as a tribute to the girl who owned my nine-year-old heart. But would Karen Nudell ever want any part of a goy whose father was an actor on a show that mined laughs from the Luftwaffe? I think not.

Producer Edward H. Feldman’s premise was that however unreal the series appeared to some critics and viewers, everyone involved in the production was to play it as though the situations were real. If the viewers could weather the laugh track behind a prison camp and care about the characters, the Allied soldiers, and their plight, then they were onboard. And whether you liked
Hogan’s Heroes
or not, it was a landmark idea, with a good cast, funny scripts, and a respectful attitude toward its audience, which is why it’s still playing fifty years later.

My dad had relied on himself—his intuition, his judgment, his sense of the room—throughout his radio career at KNX. When he started
Hogan’s
it was no longer a case of microsecond processing of ideas and speaking as it had been on the radio. He needed to trust the person at the top of the pyramid, and that person was Feldman. Feldman had extensive experience in television production, responsible for hiring and firing actors, writers, directors, costumers, and editors. Based on his experience on the pilot episode that sold the series, my dad invested his trust in Feldman, who ultimately was the barometer of class and taste for the show. Ed Feldman hired New York stage actors; movie veterans; some old-timers in cinematography, wardrobe, and makeup; some TV war-horses in writing and directing; and a pair of young film editors for pacing. Feldman had my dad’s complete trust, but
Hogan’s
would be the only
endeavor my dad undertook in which he trusted someone else more than himself. After
Hogan’s
run, the creative trust reverted solely to my dad and his own instincts, and that’s where his trouble began.

My dad was almost never home, portraying Hogan five days a week, fifteen-hour days locked up at Stalag 13 in Culver City. My dad enjoyed those thousands of hours on the set with the cast—Colonel Klink (Werner Klemperer), Sergeant Schultz (John Banner), Corporals LeBeau (Robert Clary) and Newkirk (Richard Dawson), Sergeants Carter (Larry Hovis) and Kinchloe (Ivan Dixon)—all sharing laughter and good times in character and out. The
Hogan’s
production team was cranking out thirty-two episodes a season in the first few years. Nowadays, a show like
Dexter
or
Damages
produces ten episodes and calls it a season. The production had limited time and money. An episode was filmed in three days with a $90,000 budget. Hell, today that probably doesn’t even cover Charlie Sheen’s weekly budget for cocaine.