Television Chronicles: Interview with Robert Stack

Interview with Robert Stack

ER:         It seems to me that you and the real Eliot Ness had at least one thing in common as a character trait.

RS:         What would that be?

ER:         Well, I know from reading your book [Straight Shooting] that one of the values you learned as a kid and as a young man was teamwork, and all that comes with teamwork -- loyalty, playing within the rules, reliance upon other members of the team. And having read the original book by Oscar Fraley, that’s basically the essence of Eliot Ness.

RS: Yes. I knew Oscar Fraley. He was a friend.

ER:         I also understand that you based how you played Ness on three people.

RS:         Right. You’re talking about the three bravest men I ever knew -- Audie Murphy; Carey Loftin, the dean of Hollywood stunt men, and an old chum of mine; and Buck Mazza, my Navy roommate, and a decorated dive-bomber pilot. They were all the best in their fields, and they never bragged.

ER:         I realize I’m probably the 1,000th person to say this to you, but you certainly had the intensity of Eliot Ness nailed to a tee.

RS:         I made up my mind early on that the man had to be a counterpuncher. I could not be like Gene Barry with a cane in Bat Masterson. I could not be out there competing with the flashy guys in the pin-striped suits -- the gangsters.

The real irony (and this may have been kicked around a thousand times) is the fact that, after four years -- although you don’t realize that you’re doing a show four years -- you “become” that character in the eyes of the audience. But I never thought I was Eliot Ness.

Prior to this, I got an Academy Award nomination [for Written on the Wind] for a part in which I’d played a maniac, and chewed the scenery, and beat up my wife, and tried to kill my best friend, and all of that. It was “over the top,” if anything. And to go from that, to be criticized for being “The Great Stone Face”... [Laughs] somehow, it doesn’t fit!

ER:          No, it’s like night and day.

RS:          But, see, when you play the same part 120 times, that’s what you “become” in television. And so inadvertently, all of a sudden, I “became” Eliot Ness.

But the show worked well, particularly in the first two years. Our best directors were Wally Grauman and Stu Rosenberg. Johnny Peyser was good, too. But Walter was really our best director, because there was always an offbeat “Sword of Damocles” hanging over the head of every character in his shows. There was always a tempo -- boom, bah-dah-dah, boom, bah-dah-dah -- and that’s the story. When someone sits down, and says, “Tell me what happened to you the last 20 years, Harry, and...” Wrong! Because, always in the wings, there’s somebody with a knife, or a gun, or something. And that’s what keeps people awake.

Essentially, the first two or three years, we had the best Jewish actors. We had the Actors Studio -- we had Joe Wiseman, Marty Balsam, Peter Falk. We had all the top actors on Broadway, coming in and doing our show as a lark. We had writers like Ben Maddow, who were motion picture writers -- because this was a whole new breakthrough in a medium they didn’t know the first thing about.

Now, after a while, you couldn’t buy those guys any longer, because around the fourth year, they weren’t available. In other words, we were getting people the first few years who did it as a jaunt, as a tip of the hat. You go out in the open market back then and try to buy a Ben Maddow, good luck!

ER:          I know there were three main studios that Desilu had at the time -- Desilu/Cahuenga, Desilu/Gower [the old RKO studios], and Forty Acres. I also know there were several different producers over the course of each year, and different production crews, because you had a lot of shows to film each year -- I guess 30 or 32 shows a year, which is a lot, compared to today. Did you ever shoot more than one show at once?

RS:          We did once -- once or twice when we were losing one or two days each week. The shows started out five, then went to six, then went to seven days, and we were losing two days a week. All of a sudden, we started doing two at once. And I’ve got to tell you, man, that’s when you’re really going crazy -- you don’t know what your name is, where you’re going.

We also filmed most of our stuff on the Forty Acres, and we shot occasionally, once maybe every week or ten days, at Gower. But most of the stuff was shot on our little Forty Acres “Chicago Street” -- in fact, they used to call us “The Fanatics,” because that’s where we lived, practically.

ER:          Yeah, and when you’re working 18-hour days, you turn around, and it’s three in the morning, and then you’ve got to be on the set at, what, seven or eight the next day...

RS:          It was terrible. Now, it didn’t begin like that, but once we won everything -- as you know, we won six Emmy nominations, and four Emmy awards, that first year. And once you’ve got that fire in your belly, then you just keep trying to make it as good as you can. That’s what winning an Emmy will do.

ER:          The story of how the original pilot -- I mean, the original two-parter on The Desilu Playhouse -- and how you became Eliot Ness, is kind of strange.

RS:          It’s not strange at all, speaking as someone who comes from a motion picture background. We didn’t do television.

But first, to get something straight -- because you mentioned the word “pilot.” You may or may not know (and I hope you do know) that this was never a pilot.

ER:          Right -- it was intended only as a one-time show, just as many of the segments on Desilu Playhouse were “one-time only” shows.

RS:          That’s right -- because you’re one of the very few who do know this. And the word “series” was never mentioned contractually, because they wouldn’t have gotten anyone to do it.

ER:          I understand that they wanted to ultimately release the two-parter as a feature in Europe.

RS:          That’s true, called The Scarface Mob -- and that was going to be it. That’s when Phil Karlson called me and said, “Kid, they’re going to try to get you to do a series. Don’t do it -- you’ll hate yourself in the morning.   Say you’re a film actor, and you don’t do that kind of crap. It’s terrible.”

That’s when I went to Desi Arnaz, and I said, “Is it gonna be anything good?”

And he said, “Amigo, we’re gonna make it the best damn show in all of television.”

I said, “Okay, but if you screw it up, I’m gonna come back and shoot you!” Because, believe me, I was scared to death, and I sat up all night with Rosemarie (my wife) before I decided to do the series. And then I thought I was taking a terrific risk, anyway, because Bob Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck (before she did The Big Valley), and Henry Fonda (The Deputy), all these big movie stars, had done television, and they’d all fallen flat on their face! So, film people were scared about TV

So the image I want to get clarified quickly is that this was not something that was done with a proviso of doing a show, hoping it would go to series. They never had the guts to put into the contract anything having to do with a “series” -- they wouldn’t have gotten any actor to do it. And as it was, neither the director, Phil Karlson, nor two of the major actors, Keenan Wynn and Bill Williams -- all of whom also came from film -- ever did do the series.

ER:          I know that you owned 25% of the show, and it sounds like you had a lot to say with the overall makeup, production, and running of the show.

RS:          That’s correct, but the ownership doesn’t have much to do with anything. You’ll find that anybody who is the Big Daddy of any show in which they are the lead, without whom they cannot make the show, has an input. I like to think that I was brought up as a professional, by people like Clark Gable, and a few others, to be a pro, and to do your job, and not to interfere and bastardize the author’s intention.

The thing I fought for was a quality. It was a very expensive show. We worked horrible hours -- in fact, they passed a labor law as a result of our show. We lost our camera operator, Wilbur Bradley, as a result of a heart attack. The show was a trial by fire. It was the most difficult television show at that time.

What Quinn Martin tried to do, at least the first year, was to make “motion pictures” for television, before that term was ever misused. For the first time, we brought motion picture technology (special effects, and stuff like that) to television, where it doesn’t fit. It was like pouring a quart of water in a half-pint glass -- clinically, you just cannot do that. And this is why everybody got sick, and ran down, and finally the show went off the air. I couldn’t go a fifth year. I was just exhausted.

But we tried so damned hard after we won all those Emmys to make it special. And it was a very rare, breakthrough kind of a show that did not really work, or was designed for, television. At least, it didn’t work in terms of “living with it,” because it was not structurally viable. You could not long-run this show and work 18-hour days. But we tried so hard to make it good -- and this is, I know, not a great story, but I can remember working till two, and three, and four in the morning.

ER:          Yes, I did.

RS:          Okay. Remember when the brains and stuff were all over the wall? Remember the baseball bat sequence? Well, that’s one scene we tried to get in our show for the better part of four years, and couldn’t do it. They were marching to a different drummer. They were able to do all the things in the movie (because, of course, of it being a “motion picture”) that we could not do on television because of Standards and Practices.

So you do have one point, in the nostalgic aspect of the fact that “it’s an old-fashioned show and it ain’t that violent” (except, obviously, for the machine guns and stuff). But the violence factor was vitiated, after much, much argument by psychologists and psychiatrists, as long as the end result was that the kids, or whoever was listening in, sided with the good guys against the forces of evil. I think that pretty much circumvents the “violence” factor. You cannot tell the story of Al Capone and do it with Chinese -- you do it with Italians, and you tell it like it was. So long as you happen to side with Eliot Ness against Al Capone, then I think that’s okay.

ER:          You guys always won at the end. And the audience knew that was going to be the case every week.

RS:          And a lot of people empathized with that. As I told you -- I mentioned John Belushi, and I mentioned Chevy Chase. I mentioned others who found in this legendary, apocryphal character of Eliot Ness, the prototypical hero, that they “became” that character, in a sense, emotionally, and that they got their jollies out of psychologically kicking the crap out of Al Capone, as opposed to kicking the crap out of their boss, or their wives, or their kids, or whoever else... [Laughs.] At least, that’s what one psychologist told me.

The only thing people seem to remember about The Untouchables is the so-called “violence.” They forget the behavior pattern. They forget that entire bowling leagues were scheduled around the show.

ER:          Right. It was one of those shows that people dropped what they were doing every Tuesday night so they could watch it.

RS:          And that’s the only real determinant: Does it “work”? Does it work for an audience?

ER:          I understand that driving those vintage cars could be a lot of trouble if you didn’t know exactly what you were doing.

RS:          Even if you did know what you were doing, nobody had any idea that the show was going to run as long as it would. They could’ve bought that whole fleet of cars for nothing, but instead, they rented the damned things every year.

Some of the cars had no brakes. I remember one time racing toward the camera in my 1930 Buick, when Boom! the brakes failed. All of a sudden, it was “We’ve got no brakes, hang on!” and Bo-ing! I went right through the sound stage wall.

Plus, some of the fellas who came out from New York had no idea of how to handle a stick shift. I remember one poor actor who’d been practicing all morning for his big scene -- driving the getaway car. The bad guys ran out and jumped in the car, and he gunned the motor and put ‘er in gear -- only he’d stuck it so long, he put the car in reverse, and proceeded to knock down the camera, scatter the crew, and run right over the foot of the director...! [Laughs.]

They weren’t exactly “versed in action,” as it were.

ER:          Meaning, they weren’t as accustomed to dealing with props and special effects and things like that, as film actors are.

RS:          Right. But I must tell you, though, that those New York actors were also the greatest to work with. I’m not knocking Hollywood actors, but the stage actors were great because they always came prepared. We had little or no time for rehearsal, because we had to be on camera most of the time. And I would tell every one of them -- wonderful actors, like Steve Hill [who starred in Law and Order in the early 1990s] -- I’d say, “Look, it’s up to you. You’re Legs Diamond -- you be good. The better you are, the better I’m gonna be. If you’re lousy, I’m lousy. So, be wonderful -- do your homework!”

And this is why we got these guys. They’d say, “This guy Stack is nuts, he’ll let you go. He told us that we’re the stars.”

I’d say, “You are the stars. The guys in the pin-striped suits are the stars. I’m the guy that kind of comes around and counterpunches. So you’ve got to be wonderful.”

And they all were! That’s why I killed myself staying up nights, because I had to get ready to be one-on-one with some of the best actors in America.

ER:          You had a number of interesting, dramatic experiences with actual criminals that took place around the time of the show.

RS:          Some years ago, Rosemarie and I went up to Lake Tahoe to see a friend of ours, Phyllis McGuire, perform at Cal-Neva. I believe we knew that she was, at the time, the girlfriend of Sam Giancanna, a real-life “godfather” who was also a Public Enemy Number One. He was killed about six months after I indirectly met him.

After the show, we went backstage to visit Phyllis in her dressing room. At some point, we both had the same feeling that someone was watching us -- and in fact, we did notice what looked to be an eyeball peering through a crack in the door. Although it puzzled us why anyone would want to eavesdrop on our conversation, we proceeded as if nothing were the matter. (After we’d gotten home, we heard a report that “a notorious crime boss” had been seen at the nightclub.)

Some time later, when Phyllis dropped by to see us, Rosemarie told her we’d been aware that her boyfriend had spying on us all along. “I’m glad you didn’t let on,” Phyllis told us. “He would’ve turned purple if he knew you hadn’t been fooled. As it was, that night he flew back to Chicago so he could tell all his friends that he’d really put one over on Eliot Ness!”

That gives you an idea of how slim the cleavage line between fantasy and reality sometimes is. The gangsters didn’t believe The Untouchables was fiction. Because here you had a man who could literally strike fear in the hearts of even the toughest mobsters, yet he couldn’t resist acting like a five-year-old just so he could impress his buddies in Chicago. “I spied on Eliot Ness!”

ER:          Along the same lines, I know you once participated in an actual drug raid with the L.A.P.D. as part of a photo shoot for Look magazine -- although I must admit, after reading about that in your book, it seemed odd to me that the editors asked you to do that.

RS:          Not really -- because I come from a military family. My wife and I got the Jack Webb award last year for being supportive of the police department. My family’s been in California for about 150 years, and we’ve always been supportive of all law enforcement, and/or the military.

Jack Webb used to ride around in the cars with the guys, and I’m also very “pro-cop.” And towards that end, the editors knew that about me, and that’s the reason why. It doesn’t mean, “Just because you’re an actor who plays a cop, you therefore think you’re a cop.” It merely means that this is where your heart line is: You don’t like crooks. I never put my arm around John Gotti. I never said hello to Bugsy Siegel. I don’t hang around, like some actors do, with all the crumb-bum gangsters. I never liked them.

And, as a consequence, it wasn’t that difficult to play Eliot Ness. I never thought I was Eliot Ness -- it’s just that my empathy went toward him, as opposed to figuratively “putting my arm” around the character of Marlon Brando in The Godfather, that’s all.

ER:          What is the essence of The Untouchables? Why does it continue to appeal to audiences all over the world?

RS:          It was a morality play -- a vigilante story of seven guys against the world. And the reason it worked is because of the same reason that Clint Eastwood says, “Go ahead, make my day!” That’s what Mr. Ness said to Mr. Capone. And these seven guys took on an impossible task -- suicidal, if you will -- of taking on Capone, who owned Chicago and all of the police.

That’s the basic heart line of The Untouchables. It was a morality play of the good guys versus the bad guys -- the diametric opposite of The Godfather, the most dangerous show ever made, that glorifies the gangsters. It was a story about the underdogs going in against City Hall and the crooks and the gangsters, and winning. That’s what the story is about.