Robert Vaughn a Fortunate Life Read online

  That Hamlet would feign insanity may seem strange or unbelievable, but it’s not an unknown phenomenon in the real world. The voluntary production of psychiatric symptoms, known as the Ganser syndrome, nearly always affects men, especially those suffering from depression. In Elizabethan times, what we call today “clinical depression” or “situational depression” (the latter afflicting people suffering from such profoundly disturbing events as a divorce, the death of a loved one, or a serious illness) was called melancholia. Hence the epithet “The Melancholy Dane” often used to describe Hamlet.

  Many years ago, I dubbed Shakespeare “the first lay analyst of Stratford-upon-Avon.” The evidence for this observation was the nonpareil mind of his most famous and oft-performed character. But even licensed psychiatrists find it hard to decide whether Ganser syndrome is a genuine psychiatric disorder or just another all-too-human ploy in the battle for personal survival in a hostile world. So it’s not surprising that the debate over Hamlet’s madness should persist to this day.

  My 1960 performance went well. The Los Angeles Times said my performance could be favorably compared to that of the Old Vic’s John Neville—heady praise indeed for a young actor.

  Hamlet has continued to follow me through life. I’ve seen some fifty Hamlets, from the British actor George Russell Meade, who was a bit portly, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (warm and sincere, but not terribly vulnerable, theatrical, or romantic) to Ralph Fiennes, on Broadway in 1995 (the best I’ve seen). I even recorded an album of Hamlet during my stint as television’s Man from U.N.C.L.E.—a sincere artistic effort on my part, but a mere money-making gambit on the part of the record producers, I’m afraid, designed to capitalize on my fame among the teenyboppers of the mid-1960s.

  I’m convinced that Hamlet will continue to fascinate me until I “shuffle off this mortal coil” and pass to “the undiscovered country from whose bourn, no traveler returns”—if there is such a country after all. And perhaps the final words that escape my lips will include some fragments of those thirty-five lines committed to memory in a Minneapolis summer oh so long ago . . . a show-off to the very end.

  2

  DISCOVERING LIFE IN A MURPHY BED

  This is the very ecstasy of love.

  “Frank, I’m only on the third word. I gotta have more coal.”

  I was standing behind the potbellied stove with the orange isinglass windows that warmed the upper half of the gray stucco duplex in which I grew up in the Minneapolis of the thirties.

  Frank was my grandfather, my mother’s father, but I always called him Frank. It was the brutal winter of 1941–42, the worst, people said, in over a century. In the next room, on my Mercator projection map over Frank’s bed—the one that makes Greenland as large as North America—I followed the war in the Pacific. The Japs were winning everywhere, and I was scared.

  To increase the heat where I stood, I repeated my call for more coal. My arms were stretched straight out from my shoulders as I simulated Christ’s crucifixion while I spoke his last seven words. Only if the heat were intense enough did I feel I was duplicating, to the best of my nine-year-old imagination’s ability, those terrible hours on Golgotha so long ago.

  Directly behind my very hot left shoulder was the entrance to Frank’s small bedroom, with its wondrous chiffonier containing everything from a Stern’s theatrical makeup kit with wigs, noses, putty, and spirit gum to a beaded, bloodied Indian pouch worn, according to Frank, by Sitting Bull at the Battle of Little Big Horn. It was in this room that Frank wrote such playlets as The Puppy Who Made Bunny Tracks and Pigs Whistle More on Sundays. These playwriting efforts were for me so that I might direct and star in them at the Lowell School in North Minneapolis.

  Although I grew up in the American heartland—specifically, in the progressive Minnesota of Hubert Humphrey and Garrison Keillor—my family and I were always set a little apart from the people around us. Our real world wasn’t the world of dairy farms, insurance brokers, PTA meetings, and Woolworth’s counters that most residents of the Twin Cities seemed to inhabit. Our world was the world of the theater, and without much explicit discussion it was somehow understood from an early age that I would follow in the family tradition by becoming an actor.

  In fact, my family had a long heritage of acting. My mother’s mother, Marie or Mary Halloran (she was called by both names), was an actress in Glencoe, Minnesota. Frank was the director of the Glencoe Comedy Players acting troupe. (When they later moved to Minneapolis, he made a living as a stage director and paperhanger—though he preferred to describe himself as an “interior decorator.”) I’ve even heard that Frank’s father, Sebastian Gaudel, was in the commedia dell’arte in France in the nineteenth century.

  As for my father, Gerald Walter Vaughn, he was a well-known radio actor, famous for the raspy voice he deployed effectively in tough-guy roles—gangsters, cattle rustlers, pirates.

  My forebears weren’t stars occupying the upper stratosphere of the theatrical universe. They were working actors, living from job to job, never too proud to take on a role, however lowly. Looking back at the very long list of movies, TV dramas, miniseries, stage shows, and (yes) even radio programs I’ve done over the past five decades—including both a handful of recognized classics and quite a few that are blessedly forgotten—one might easily conclude that I inherited their attitude and never abandoned it, even after vaulting with relative swiftness to the airier reaches of Hollywood.

  Growing up in a theatrical family carries with it a touch of chaos. In my case, it was pleasant chaos. I lived apart from my parents for much of my childhood, but I don’t remember resenting this. And after my mother and father were separated, I saw my dad only twice. Much of the time I was cared for by my grandparents. Yet somehow I knew in my bones that my parents cared about me. From his home in New York, my father sent me twenty dollars a month via my grandparents and sent me cards for my birthday.

  He also sent me occasional presents—a watch and, on one memorable occasion, an English racing bike. Apparently no one had ever seen such a bike in Minneapolis, and it was destroyed the first time I brought it to school. Not by me, but by a knot of angry classmates who apparently thought it was time I was brought down a peg or two. As a youngster, I was always a little disliked by my peers because of my actorly attitude. (I suppose it would have been different if I’d grown up in Beverly Hills or Manhattan, but West Broadway in Minneapolis was another matter.) I imagine they thought I was an uppity snot—and I rather imagine I was at that.

  But I was always basically happy wherever I was, however, because I could always pretend to be wherever I imagined. For what reason, I know not, but I most often chose to imagine being in England. I would fill my red Radio Flyer with English history books at the public library on Emerson Avenue, then drag it the half mile north to my home at 1826 West Broadway.

  The books were very large, with glorious color pictures of Williams I and II and Henry I and Stephen, the Normans whose reigns covered roughly the hundred years from the middle of the tenth to the middle of the eleventh centuries. I returned to the Emerson Library throughout my elementary school years, wagon in tow, replacing big books already consumed with new ones covering the Plantagenets, the House of Lancaster, and the House of York, until finally I came to the Tudors, where I met Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, and more important, her contemporary, the sire of my Melancholy Dane, Will Shakespeare.

  I remember carrying both a first baseman’s glove and a catcher’s mitt on these library treks. Why I had them I don’t know, since I was essentially a pretty good pitcher. But I used the two gloves to carefully cover the English history books during my weekly journey to and from the Emerson Library. I guess I didn’t want the local guys to think I was a sissy who read books—let alone books of medieval English history.

  Yet the notion of being an actor was always present in the back of my mind.

  When I arrived at the age of ten without having acted in a real play, I decided that the next best
thing would be a one-man show for my fellow fourth graders at the Lowell School. I also concluded that rather than wait for my grandfather Frank to come up with some material, I would simply borrow George M. Cohan’s songs and dances from the Warner Bros. movie Yankee Doodle Dandy. I had already acquired an Adolphe Menjou three-piece suit from a local secondhand store (it must have belonged to a midget) along with a big floppy bow tie patterned after the ones Sinatra made famous at the New York Paramount. I found an old derby in one of Frank’s theatrical trunks, and I was ready.

  I had seen Jimmy Cagney do his strange, butt-out, stiff-legged dancing style as Cohan many times at the Paradise Theater, sometimes spending all afternoon and evening watching his performance. I convinced my favorite teacher, Mrs. Northfoss, to let me entertain the troops. So one day there I was, hoofing and singing, neither of which I did well, to the shock and horror of my classmates.

  By January 1943, I figured that since I knew everything there was to know about acting (I was eleven at the time), I might try my hand at directing. I also thought it might be best to select some material other than Frank’s and George M. Cohan’s efforts. I went down to my beloved Emerson Library and picked out a one-act play titled The White Birds of Cholula. It had a starring role for me as Pedro, “a Mexican mystic.” This time, I forced my school friends not only to sit through my performance, but to act in the production as well. It was a great success and was held over for a second performance.

  In my neighborhood gang at the time, there was Tom next door, Smitty and Ernest Jr. two doors away, and Sally across the alley. Sally and I were the same age, and I gave her a book titled The Magical Monarch of Mo, a book that is still in her family today. Arlene, my senior by one year, lived in the other house next to ours and was my walking-to-school friend throughout much of my boyhood. I was always attracted to older women.

  A new teacher appeared at the Lowell School for my final year there, the pretty Mary Shattuck. She was fresh out of college, about five feet tall, and appeared to be in her early teens, although in retrospect I am sure she was at least twenty. The boys all fell in love with her, and I decided I would try to kiss her if I could. One day, I was alone with her in the cloakroom, and as I was about to make my move, she sensed something was up and nimbly stepped aside.

  Many years later, in the 1960s, when I had become a well-known television personality, I found out that she had married into the Dayton Department Store chain, and I rang her up when I was in Minneapolis on a publicity junket. When I introduced myself by name, she remembered me immediately, not from television, but from the cloakroom. She told me she had retired from teaching at the end of her first year and declined the opportunity to renew our all-too-brief love affair.

  After graduating from Lowell in June of ’44 and feeling my acting oats, having now directed and starred in a play, I headed off to join Mother and John Connor in Iowa as a resident member of the “Famous Players’ Tent Show.” I was enlisted by Vincent Dennis, the owner of the company whom John had met in Chicago that winter in a play titled Unexpected Honeymoon. My summer job was to be the proverbial “jack of all showbiz trades,” meaning I was to serve as the tent setter-upper, the popcorn-maker, the assistant to the magician, the assistant to the chalk-talk artist, the light-board operator, the prop man, and, most important, an actor.

  We played a dozen towns in Iowa, moving on each week, striking the tent, hitting the road late at night, and sleeping on top of the canvas as we journeyed to a new venue. There were five plays in our repertoire that summer: The Stork Laid an Egg, Today’s Children, The Shepherd of the Hills, Hollywood Comes to Tildy Ann, and Toby Goes to Washington.

  In the last play, I spoke my first line on a professional stage. Standing as straight and tall as a twelve-year-old could, I blasted out, “Telegram for Mr. Edward Mason!” Each night, I came farther and farther onto the stage until I was almost on top of the audience. At long last, I was really in show business, and nothing could stop me from realizing my little boy’s dream.

  Starting Jordan Junior High School in the fall of ’44 as a little seventh-grade “beezer,” I strived to hang in there with my friends, all of whom I had known since kindergarten. By then, they had all made peace with my histrionic aspirations. Suddenly, I had to convince a new bunch of twelve-year-olds to get with the program.

  My first mistake that autumn was to arrive at my new school in my sixth-grade graduation wardrobe, which consisted of a camel-hair sport coat, a long key chain, rather like the ones zoot-suiters in Detroit wore, and my largest Sinatra bow tie. I was not well-received. In fact, I sensed I was going to be spending a lot of time after school fighting literally for my right to be me—a me who was very different from my new classmates. Basically, a lot of the guys wanted to kick the shit out of me. A modicum of Irish charm coupled with a glib, facile tongue stayed most of my potential tormentors. I avoided all but two punch-ups, one of which I actually won.

  During the ’44–’45 theatrical season, John and Mother toured in a little production called Ramshackle Inn, starring Zasu Pitts and featuring a recent Smith graduate, Nancy Davis—later the First Lady of the United States, Nancy Reagan. The production played the Lyceum Theatre in Minneapolis, and for the first time, I was able to prove to my nay-saying school friends that Mother was a real actress and not just a product of my fevered theatrical imagination. Luck played a role in her performing in the city of her birth. Although John was a regular member of the cast, Mother had been hired as an understudy for the character lead opposite Pitts. While leaving the train in the city during the company’s arrival in Minneapolis, the actress Mother was standing in for fell and sprained her ankle, allowing Marcella to star opposite Zasu in her hometown. Although, to the best of my knowledge, none of my school friends went to see the play, I was secure in the knowledge that had they shown up, Mother would have been up there on the boards for all the world to see.

  On rare occasions in my grammar school years, if I had some advance notice of when my father would be on the radio, acting in shows such as Gang Busters, Crime Doctor, or The FBI in Peace and War, I would gather some of the neighborhood kids and tell them to listen closely to the closing credits. They did, but none of them ever believed Walter Vaughn was related to me. So I eventually gave up that stratagem, figuring I would have to wait for some better proof of my other life in my show business summers with my real family and actor friends.

  But I wasn’t completely cut off from normal life. I made my share of friends, did well in some classes, skated by in some others, and participated in most of the usual hijinks Midwestern kids would have enjoyed in the years preceding midcentury. I developed an interest in sports, and by the time I reached high school, I was fast and strong enough to be named co-captain of the cross-country team. I also ran the half mile (actually the 880) on the track team and even played basketball for one season.

  And I was involved in other activities outside the theatrical world, including some that verged on another later interest of mine—the political. I spent the spring of 1945 (as World War II, the constant backdrop of my boyhood, was finally winding down) setting up chairs at Howie’s Beer Hall on Penn and West Broadway in North Minneapolis. Various candidates for mayor stopped by this local bar, a favorite of my mother’s, to deliver speeches explaining why each should be the one to lead the larger of the Twin Cities.

  One of them was a young fellow with the improbable name of Hubert Horatio Humphrey. Hubert always arrived early at Howie’s, and over the clatter of the metal chairs, he would yell, “Can you hear me, Bobby?” I would yell back, suppressing the giggles, “I can hear you, Hubert!”

  A score of years later, Hubert and I shared an open car at the St. Paul Winter Carnival. He had become Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President, and I was television’s Napoleon Solo.

  I’m sure that, as my teenage years unfolded, the fact that I was a fairly good-looking fellow helped win me social acceptance. I didn’t think much about my looks, but I was obsessed with clothin
g, scraping together spare change from my allowance and the occasional odd job in a vain effort to buy stylish duds like the ones I saw pictured in the glossy magazines of the day.

  I wasn’t cured of this obsession until my years on The Man from U.N.C.L.E., when I sometimes had to change costumes six or seven times during a single day’s shooting. Yes, there can be too much of a good thing.

  At the same time, as my chest broadened and my voice deepened, thoughts about more than an acting career began to fill my mind, just as they do with most healthy young guys. (“The Child is Father of the man,” as Wordsworth had it.)

  When does a young boy become a young man? And how does he know the difference? For me, it was when I stumbled onto a copy of Esquire magazine in my beloved Emerson Library in Minneapolis sometime in the early years of World War II—around the time I began to have double digits in my age.

  The “Magazine for Men” featured pictures of what were called Varga or Petty girls, named after the talented artists who painted them. In ultra-vivid colors and textures so hyper-real they looked practically three-dimensional, they depicted voluptuous ladies spilling out of whatever they were barely wearing. I didn’t quite know why, but somehow those female images—with their lushly welcoming smiles, luxuriant manes, amazingly slender torsos, exploding breasts, and endless silky legs terminating in strappy high heels—made me feel warm and happy. I wanted to see more of them. Occasionally, when I was lucky, I might even find photographs of partially dressed girls. (I never even dreamed of seeing one naked.) But in time, I began to suspect that these newfound emotions had something to do with being a “man” in the sense that the publishers of Esquire had in mind.