Crane (9 page)

In addition to my dad’s grueling weekday schedule, on the weekends,
there were promotional trips to CBS affiliates around the country, “meet and greets” with fans, and visits to New York for appearances on CBS programs like
What’s My Line?
and
The Arthur Godfrey Show.
So while all those fun-loving POWS and their German captors were winning the hearts and minds of America, my mom was left to hold the home front together, still just Annie from Connecticut (as she always will be). My mom bristled sometimes having her mother under the same roof, and there were clashes now and again. My dad didn’t really appreciate having his taciturn, judgmental Swedish mother-in-law always within earshot, but he was home less and less. The upside for all of us was that Nan was there all the time taking care of my younger sisters. She was the built-in babysitter, tsk-tsker, and Dean of Discipline. I became the little man again, the only male in the house for extended periods of time.

7

When we left the Scottsdale morgue, detectives Ron Dean and Dennis Borkenhagen, who were put in charge of the red-hot case, swapped possible murder scenarios with us. It wasn’t quite a sit-down interview, just a trading of information. I ran through a list of people I thought were possible suspects. My first thought was there was a jealous boyfriend or husband out there, but then again, the women my dad fooled around with were not really the kind of women who had jealous boyfriends or husbands. Maybe my dad just fell into bed with the wrong woman this time. The Scottsdale apartment was what the police described as “a very passionate murder scene,” not some cold-hearted Mafia hit. Someone had wielded a blunt instrument with enough force to kill my dad with two anger-filled strikes. Dean and Borkenhagen’s prime suspect was the roving video equipment salesman John Henry Carpenter. They felt he had means, opportunity, and the physical strength to have inflicted the fatal blows. What they didn’t have was a motive.

Then I thought about my stepmother, Patti. When
Hogan’s Heroes
debuted in 1965, the German Kommandant, Colonel Klink, had a curvaceous secretary called Helga, played by an actress named Cynthia Lynn. She mysteriously left the show after the first raucous season, replaced by another buxom actress wearing blonde pigtails and tight sweaters. It wasn’t until years later I found out that the reason Cynthia Lynn abruptly left the show was because she and my dad were having an affair, and her husband discovered the liaison and gave her an ultimatum: leave the show or divorce. She chose her marriage and cancelled her career. Unfortunately, her marriage got a pink slip a few years later, anyway.

So Helga became Hilda, and Cynthia Lynn dissolved into Sigrid Valdis. Valdis as Hilda would say, “Ja, mein Colonel” from the second season through the 168th and final episode. Valdis as Hilda would appear with Klink and Schultz on my dad’s one and only record album cover. Valdis as Hilda would treat those on-set kisses with Colonel Hogan in Klink’s outer office as a rehearsal, a prelude to an insurance policy on an acting career that was as doomed as the Third Reich. Valdis as Hilda would become my stepmother.

Sigrid Valdis was the nom de guerre of Patricia (Patti) Olson, sprung from the onion fields of Bakersfield to occupy the fertile beds of Hollywood. She landed the role of Hilda shortly after her first husband died from a brain aneurysm. They had been married just under ten years and had a young daughter, Melissa. Patti had worked with James Coburn in
Our Man Flint
and with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in
Marriage on the Rocks,
playing small roles requiring large cleavage. On the
Hogan’s
set her talents attracted the immediate attention of Richard Dawson, but Patti was not going to hitch her ample wagon to the corporal when the colonel might be available for a hookup.

On a TV series, actors begin as coworkers, but if you’re lucky enough to be a regular cast member on a hit show, the series actors can spend what amounts to years together rehearsing, filming, socializing—breaking for lunch and sometimes for dinner, too. The actors become real friends, second family members, and in the case of my dad and Patti, lovers.

Their time spent filming together segued into evening meetings at restaurants, which then morphed into quick, discreet sexual encounters in my dad’s dressing room in the production building, and finally into full-blown carnal knowledge at Patti’s apartment in Westwood on my dad’s way home to a much more chaste Tarzana.

As my mom played both parental roles at home, Patti played the hyphenate roles of friend-lover-wife-mistress at work and on the road. My dad was also playing a multitude of roles: good Catholic son, high school sweetheart, husband, father, Casanova, and most important, Colonel Robert E. Hogan, lead character on a flourishing network television series beloved by millions.

Patti not only seemed to understand my dad’s needs and proclivities; she nurtured them, fed them, and even participated in them. Their relationship began while my mom and dad were still married, and while I
can’t cite it specifically as the cause of my parents’ divorce, Hogan and Hilda were a force that would not be denied.

As far as we knew at that moment in Scottsdale, Patti had neither means nor opportunity, but she alone did have a motive.

8

My dad was on autopilot as his recognition factor went from zero to ninety in a month, which naturally impacted the rest of the family. A dramatic change was in the air for the Crane household. Walking through a crowded Du-Par’s to get a hamburger suddenly became disconcerting as we heard tittering, whispering, or even a rebel yell—“Hogan!” My dad was less concerned.

Soon, too, we had strange people showing up at the Vanalden house. An electric gate was installed. One attractive woman in her thirties somehow got through the gate and rang the front doorbell. The fact that there was someone at the front door signaled something odd. Everyone who knew us, who visited us at the house, came in through a side door that opened into the kitchen. My mom nervously answered as I stood guard nearby. The woman showed us a photo of a young child and said she wanted to see the father—my dad. My mom, in her low-key style, managed to get the woman off the property. If there was any fallout between her and dad over this, I never heard about it, and to my knowledge no one ever heard from the woman again. The members of my family—mom, sisters, grandmothers, grandfather, aunt, uncle, cousins—had no experience in dealing with these kinds of occurrences. There was no guidebook, no
Celebrity for Dummies,
we could reference.

My dad’s anonymity was forever gone, but he felt he had earned the notice. Good or bad reviews aside, he had taken the next step, a big one, and there was no point in looking back. My dad was securely in the present. Being recognized was a Nielsen-like test of popularity. His face was the product he was selling, and if it didn’t get recognized, hightailing back to radio would have been an ego destroyer for him. He wanted to
attain a certain level of performance quality whereby he could, at least in his own mind, see the taillights of Jack Lemmon, Gig Young, and Tony Randall off in the distance. To him, the loss of privacy resulting from being on a hit TV show was a necessary evil, even as the intensity of his celebrity grew exponentially over the next few years.

Besides, his work was creative, he was making more money than his family had ever known, and he felt he was demolishing the small-town thought processes that had held him back. His only real disappointment was having to give up the radio show. Performing live on radio was his purest form of expression because the only script was in his head and there wasn’t a supporting cast, only funny voices or sound effects on vinyl. It was all his creation, with the assistance of his “fine engineer, Jack Chapman.” That was a pure creative process for my dad, and he was sad to give it up. But it was physically impossible to do a daily four-hour radio show and a one-camera filmed television series at the same time. So he took the plunge and put all his chips on making fun of the Third Reich.

Still, he would never completely shake the burg mentality engrained in his DNA. He would drive over to the Hollywood branch of Bank of America and stand in line to make a deposit on his lunch break, still wearing his Hogan uniform. It would never have occurred to him to send someone to do this chore. He picked up his own dry cleaning, went to the DMV, and always drove himself or had me drive him to the airport. There was never a VIP contingent for him.

CBS was riding a ratings-grabbing wave. It was a big-time network with big-time hit shows, and my dad was a part of that.
Hogan’s Heroes
finished in the top ten in the ratings in its first season. There were Emmy nominations: for the show itself, for Werner Klemperer’s Colonel Klink as Best Supporting Actor, and for my dad as Best Actor in a Comedy Series (the first of two nominations). Unfortunately, he was up against Don Adams in
Get Smart
and Dick Van Dyke, who was the eventual winner. Even though my dad didn’t win, he was pleased to have been nominated, to have been recognized. It validated his move from his number one radio show.

At home Mom was keeping everything as low-key as possible, almost pretending all the hoopla wasn’t even happening. Occasionally, however, she would succumb to the Hollywood sirens’ call, getting out the fur coat and attending industry and charity event dinners with my dad. She went to the Emmy Awards. She did participate, but she certainly had no aspirations
to be a Hollywood wife or even to be part of Hollywood. For God’s sake, we lived in Tarzana, which
TV Guide
called “the unfashionable Tarzana, California,” when it did an article on my dad. My folks enjoyed the perception that it was unfashionable. We were living in a town so named because the guy who created the “Lord of the Jungle,” Edgar Rice Burroughs, happened to be raising sheep on a hill off Reseda Boulevard. People expected TV stars and film people to live large in Bel-Air or Beverly Hills, not out in the foothill recesses of the San Fernando Valley, which in the 1950s and ’60s was more like Mayberry with oranges.

I was attending Gaspar de Portola Junior High School, and more and more kids were making the connection between Colonel Hogan and me, between Bob Crane and this kid named Bobby Crane who was in their English or industrial drafting class. I started to withdraw a bit because giggling kids at school I’d never met were awkwardly approaching me to ask, “Is your dad Colonel Hogan?” I didn’t like being prejudged depending on whether people liked
The Donna Reed Show
or
Hogan’s Heroes
or KNX or disliked wacky neighbors or laughable Germans or radio. My classmates’ prejudgment was an automatic response, sometimes stoked at home by parents. After all, most fourteen-year-olds’ opinions are just reflections of those of their parents.

Coincidentally, Portola was the same school Dick Van Dyke’s two sons, Chris and Barry, attended. I didn’t really know Chris, but I knew Barry a little bit. Barry always handled being Dick Van Dyke’s son with ease, it seemed to me, and Dick Van Dyke was a major star. Not only did he have a hit TV series, he had just starred in
Mary Poppins.
He was truly a big star, and yet Barry handled it with style. All the kids at Portola knew who he was, but he was completely unflustered by it. I didn’t know how he did that, and I envied him his cool. He was also part of the fast, hip crowd, at least as fast and as hip as thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds in the Valley could be. Barry’s crowd had the best parties at the neatest houses in Encino. Maybe that was part of it. Barry was an Encino kid. I was a Tarzana kid. There was in my mind a big difference. I thought Encino was more of a show business community, more upscale and hipper than Tarzana. I mean, Dick Van Dyke drove a Jaguar XKE. My dad drove a Cadillac. Barry Van Dyke was like the chief ambassador for show biz kids, and I didn’t quite get what my role at school was supposed to be. I didn’t know what my role in life was supposed to be. It was like Barry was the ambassador to London and I was the chargé d’affaires in Ouagadougou.
I had once been, long ago, a cute radio kid, but now I was just an eighth-grade student trying to figure out algebra and worrying about how many sit-ups I could do in one minute without farting. I was positive that if Barry Van Dyke farted during a sit-up test in gym class, he’d handle that like a pro, too.

9

After seeing my dad at the morgue I knew I had to call home. This was as close as I would ever come to being a war correspondent calling the international desk, reporting on the day’s casualty count. I could only imagine how many tears had already been spilled in anticipation of the worst. Certainly, there had been no phone call from my dad to my mom and Chuck clearing up the police blotter rumor. How did military messengers deliver the bad news? I’d much rather have done it in person. There is a coldness to a voice traveling through copper wire.

Luckily, Chuck answered the phone. I told him that my dad had not been shot; he’d been hit with something. I confirmed he was dead. I said I saw him. I said I saw him dead. I tried to keep my emotion in check like a good foreign correspondent. We weren’t on the phone long. I spoke, too, to my mom. She was sobbing. I could hear my dad’s mom in the background, her low moaning.

My family had been getting calls from friends and acquaintances who had heard something about the crime on the radio. That was long before CNN and the twenty-four-hour news cycle. The only reason the media even found out about the murder was because someone in the Scottsdale Police Department faxed the preliminary report to a reporter at the
Arizona Republic,
and it mushroomed from there. Still, it was nothing like what would happen now in the twenty-first century.

Vaughn, Goldstein, and I checked into a nearby motel for the night. We were going to talk to the police again the next morning. It was still June 29, the evening of a very long day. I went out to the motel pool and collapsed into a chaise longue. I drank a couple of the beers I had liberated earlier from the crime scene and stared at the sky. I had never felt lonelier.