RockingDoggy Retro

"Maybe I'm kidding myself," Alan says, "but I figure I can always break away and do another show, but Ed might run into real trouble if he tried it, and I think he knows it."

"But isn't Ed getting the best lines?" I asked.

"He certainly gets his share," Alan admits. "Don't forget, though, that I've always got to be there to hear Ed's lines."

(For those who have spared themselves the sight of a grown man conversing with a horse, it should be explained that Mr. Ed only talks to and is understood by Wilbur, who is Alan Young.)

"Are there times when you feel pretty silly about the whole thing?" I probed further.

"Only when I sometimes catch myself talking about the idiot horse after I've left the studio. But I'm not as bad off as some of the viewers."

"You mean . . . ?"

"Exactly. They write fan letters to Ed. The ones I really worry about are those which are signed by other horses."

"What is the gist of such letters?"

"Horseback riding. I'm convinced that riding is bigger in this country than bowling," says Alan, incredulously.

"You ever try to answer any of this horse mail?"

"I used to do it, and sign Ed's name. He can talk, as you know, but never learned to write. Now, however, the mail is too much for me. A girl named Millie in our office does it now. Writes a nice horse-hand, too."

Occasionally someone at the network decides it's a great idea to wire TV columnists around the country and tell them that Mr. Ed will be telephoning them the next day.

The fellow who does Ed's voice then calls the columnist, hoping that the latter will go along—asking questions and playing along with the gag ("It's a horse on you.")

"Later I get letters from these guys," Alan reports, "and they admit feeling 'like a nut,' but I guess they get a kick out of it. There was one columnist who suggested I go to an analyst."

Except for France, where Brigitte Bardot is still the national idol, Mr. Ed is very big on European TV. Alan went to his native England last summer, and planned to extend the vacation to the Continent.

"I cancelled it when the network told me I would have to tour so many cities and attend so many cocktail parties where Mr. Ed was seen on TV. It wouldn't have been a vacation, and anyway I didn't have that much time," Alan explains.

I am inclined to share the feeling of those Alan Young admirers mentioned at the beginning here. It is a shame his talents are being frittered away on a series which too often is more ridiculous than whimsical.#

ABOVE: Italian and Greek film screenings at the Nova.

BELOW: Couple of 1950s classics get a return season. Imagine these would have been popular. Australia didn't get colour TV until 1975, and not everyone could just afford to buy one new.

ABOVE: Sundown Drive-In delivering the schlock action double. Wild women anyone? Meanwhile, the Center Cinema is showing The Ruling Class from 1972, a savage critique of the British class system apparently. Did people really rock up at 11.15pm AT NIGHT for a film like this?

BELOW: This film is a TV movie from 1974, but it wasn't unusual in the 1970s to screen this sort of film in cinemas.

BELOW: Karen Black was everywhere in the 1970s.

He rarely smokes and I have never seen him drink alcohol; he eats at “lunatic hours.” He loves and has all kinds of animals, from pheasants to donkeys.

He spends hours listening to pop records and is genuinely interested in the work of other artists.

He hates flying and always travels with his “caravan” of a dozen or more cars, trailers, and so on.

This is how he travels between Bel Air, his home in California, and Memphis, where he has his Southern-style mansion.

This was a genuine old Southern home which Elvis bought “to get away from the glare of publicity.”

It is rather surprising, therefore, that across the large and imposing wrought-iron gates is the design of a guitar picked out with neon lights.

There used to be a comfortable colored lady who looked after the place somewhat vaguely and, when necessary, cooked somewhat badly.

When the gang was around the great sport used to be snake hunting.

The requirements were one machete knife, one rubber suit such as you use for skin diving, and unlimited energy.

It has always been a source of surprise that Elvis has never visited Australia or the British Isles where his fans are countless.

While undoubtedly his manager has used Elvis’s time to the best possible advantage, there are probably other reasons, and one is his hatred (or perhaps fear) of flying.

(continued overleaf) SORRY NOT AVAILABLE.

★ ABOVE: Elvis looks tired, bored and a bit plump. Keeping his weight down has been a never ending problem since entering show business. He eats at “lunatic” hours . . .

KONG back on the big screen.

Big star vehicles in films that probably ring no bells today. ANDERSON TAPES is a techno-crime thriller directed by Sidney Lumet.

One of MANY Agatha Christie adaptations with all-star casts produced in the 70s. This one not as big as others but they snared Bernard Herrman for the music. CONQUISTA likely to be a short film about Native Americans from 1971.

THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE was a controversial release in 1968. Interesting that it resurfaces here. Perhaps ahead of its time.

Kubrick's controversial classic with a blurb for intellectuals. WITH LOVE IN MIND likely to be a 1970 short feature that shows a lot of love.

BILLY JACK (1971) like EASY RIDER a few years before, was one of those counterculture movies that came at the right time and hit big.

Sunday night Italian films look family friendly.

Saturday matinee films are both from 1959.

SUMMER OF 42 was a monster hit. A romance that seems forgotten now.

Patti, who, as Sigrid Valdis, her stage name, plays Commandant Klink’s secretary in the series Hogan’s Heroes, is blissful in her pregnancy, and looking forward eagerly to visiting Australia.

And Bob said he had never been happier in his life.

“Suddenly, everything has come together. Patti, this home, and now the baby. It’s wonderful. For me it’s like the first baby all over again . . .”

The English Tudor house, Patti explained, was in the area where she had been born and raised and had always been her dream home. Magically, it was put on the market for the first time in 16 years just as they began house hunting.

“Bob was tied up with relatives and said he couldn’t get away,” she recalled. “I said, ‘You’ve got to ditch them for an hour.’ The moment he walked in, he said, ‘I don’t know how much, but we’ll buy it!’” Patti whistled. “They must have heard him.”

The couple, Australia-bound next week as special guests of honor at the Logie Awards, have paid a high price for their happiness in other ways, too.

The unfounded gossip that centred around their courtship, Bob estimates, lost him at least $40,000 in personal appearance bookings and much emotionally. “I was the woman who took him away from his wife of 20 years,” said Patti bitterly.

One nationally syndicated columnist specifically described Bob’s former wife Ann bursting through the door of an apartment where they were supposedly living together while co-starring in a stage play.

“Why she (the columnist) didn’t check with me I’ll never understand. Patti and I haven’t even done a play together,” said Bob. “We were always so careful to avoid situations that might start gossip like that,” added Patti.

One other story that particularly hurt and upset the couple was that Patti had been accepted into the Crane house almost as a daughter. “Not once had she been in our house,” said Bob angrily.

When Patti joined Hogan’s Heroes in its second year the two became very good friends. “Bob was the one I kept going to for advice and to unburden my problems on,” recalled Patti, who has a daughter by a previous marriage.

“I had separated from my husband and then he died and there was an unhappy romance. Believe me, the last thing I needed was an involvement with a man with a wife and three kids in the (suburban San Fernando) Valley.”

For Bob it was a period of marital limbo. He and his wife (“we started going together when she was 12 and I was 14 years”) had separated but decided to “try again” when he got his break in Hollywood.

“We were all raised Catholics which made it that much more complicated,” said Bob frankly. “You knew it wasn’t going to work, but you were reluctant to do anything about it . . . Patti wasn't the instigator (of the final rift).”

The change in their relationship was so gradual and subtle that neither recognised it immediately. “My life was in such chaos,” Patti recalled, “and we found we were talking to each other on the phone almost every day.

“Maybe I’d only be on the set an hour or so a day and if we didn’t talk it would feel all wrong.”

Today in marriage Bob marvels at the manner in which they balance each other out. They are, he grins, the odd couple in that Patti is the organiser and business woman while “I’m the show business”.

He is frankly impressed with her astute real estate investments, her shrewd and hard-nosed business sense which he is learning to “let it go” and her obvious talents as an interior decorator, an ambition sidetracked by acting.

“I don’t mind that Patti’s going to continue as Hilda — if there’s still a Hogan’s Heroes, of course — after the baby,” said Bob. “At least, in her case when she gets home she becomes very domestic. Patti hasn’t got that driving ambition, thank goodness, that makes her go off to New York to do a soap opera.

“She would be a good producer, she reads all the scripts submitted to me although I always boasted I would never let a wife of mine do it. I trust her judgment implicitly.”

Since their marriage, Bob confesses, he is a more rounded man, but in the literal sense. In the short time since Hogan’s Heroes began its annual hiatus he has added 10 pounds.

“It’s the wine, the imported cheeses and gourmet foods,” said Bob. “This has not always been my way of life, you know. I’ve always been Mr. Common when it came to food. Gourmet used to be a hamburger to me.”

Patti threw up her arms. “Eating is one of the great pleasures and this one used to chew twice and swallow.” Bob conceded sheepishly, “She says I’m more like a human garbage disposal unit.”

“She makes it easy,” he continued grimacing, “like the restaurant when I was confronted with the dessert trolley and this one says, ‘The gourmet will have the rainbow sherbert’ . . . Really, she’s a great cook . . .”

“But I can’t get him to eat snails,” she shrugged. “Patti, it’s not the snails,” he protested in injured tones. “I just can’t take the garlic. It, it repeats on me.”

There is one thing Patti has come to terms with but doubts if she will ever really get used to. This is the pace he lives at, and explains the home’s eight phones, which keep him constantly on the move.

“As a present, I had a basement room enlarged as a den for him with a sauna bath, projection booth, bar, bathroom and porch.

“I was so frightened that he was going to find out and one day, when he looked out at the porch that had materialised almost overnight, I thought the game was up.

“‘You know,’ he said to me, ‘I love our little porch!’ It’s very hard not to love him.”

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Notes: The Logie Awards (Logies) are an annual TV and entertainment awards ceremony in Australia. International guests are usually invited to present awards and mingle with local wildlife.

ROCK THE GREAT LOVER HAS HIS HANDS FULL...

GIRLS, GIRLS, EVERYWHERE!

ON Here Come The Brides, Susan Tolsky was about the only one of the hundred prospective brides never ardently pursued by those lusty lumberjacks.

"A long time ago I had to face the fact that men don’t look at me and start panting with a crazy look in their eyes," she said.

"So then, as you can well imagine, this has been something of a milestone for me. I mean, whoever expected to see poor old Susan Tolsky in bed with Rock Hudson."

It may seem a giant step from Here Come The Brides and Robert Brown’s fatherly protectiveness to Pretty Maids All In A Row and Rock Hudson’s decidedly amorous advances. But in one sense it is surprisingly a small step.

The black comedy and somewhat mysterious movie is the latest and one of the better examples of how the barrier that once divided film makers into television and movie camps has collapsed.

Movie and television producers are invading each others' fields. Fellini’s television film was a bright spot of the recent and disastrous Venice film festival, and the old adage that audiences won’t pay to see anyone they can see on television for free has long been retired to the ranks of myth.

Pretty Maids All In A Row brings together, behind the scenes, giants of the two mediums. Star Trek producer Gene Roddenberry, in his feature film debut, and director Roger Vadim.

The discoverer of Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve, Roger has drawn heavily on television for the beauties who give real meaning to the movie’s title and the eight chief maids are but the tip of the glamorous iceberg.

At just one exhausting casting session, Roger, who could only laugh when quizzed about it, had to survey a dozen naked posteriors to select one girl to play a student with the most beautiful buttocks at a high school where Rock Hudson is an athletic coach. "I’m a rather busy man," Rock moaned.

"It’s difficult but we want to keep the story a secret, it’s full of surprises too sharp to tip in advance," Gene said. "It’s a comment on American morals. It’s truly a black comedy."

Grinning, he added: "Let’s say it’s a story designed to expand the 'educational' horizons of our present day youth."

Their eight pretty maids include Joanna Cameron whose dozen television guest star credits include The Survivors pilot with Lana Turner, Mod Squad creator Aaron Spelling’s "discovery" Brenda Sykes, and Joy Bang who has made a series bid in The Cowboys pilot.

"Bang is a good Danish name," Joy said. "I’m getting married at the end of the year but I think I’ll keep using it professionally."

Pretty Maids, however, isn’t the only way Rock Hudson is filming for television. He has already completed a Hollywood special and as soon as he completes the black comedy he will head-line a BBC spectacular in London.

Earlier this year, in fact, he came close to doing a variety series which isn't as off beat as it sounds. This month in America he releases Rock Gently, an album of songs composed for him by Rod McKuen.

"I felt I should take one thing at a time," Rock explained his decision against the series. "It’ll be amusing, not to mention profitable, if this album’s a hit. After all, I’m 45 years old and that’s a little bit late to start a singing career.

"I’d rather sing than do anything, really. Music has always been the most important of my hobbies. Even more so than bridge and skiing."

As Rock Hudson said, he’s a rather busy man.

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Notes: The film was a flop (Roger Ebert hated it. Tarantino likes it) but it actually does sound quite interesting. Roger Vadim directed. Gene Roddenberry wrote the script. Lalo Schifrin composed the music. Solid cast with Telly Savalas and Angie Dickinson in support. James Doohan (Scotty from Star Trek) has a role.

Worth catching is Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed, a feature length documentary about his life and work.