Sun 3 Aug 2014
Mike Nevins on MIKE HAMMER, EFREM ZIMBALIST JR, JAMES GARNER, and ROY HUGGINS (& RAYMOND CHANDLER).
Posted by Steve under Authors , Columns , Obituaries / Deaths Noted[10] Comments
by Francis M. Nevins
My July column, the longest I’ve ever written, was completely devoted to the Mike Hammer TV series of 1958-59 but there are a couple of related items that I couldn’t squeeze in last time. I trust no Hammerhead will mind if I begin with these.
Two questions surrounding the series caught my attention as I was fiddling with the column. First, was there a Hammer pilot episode and if so which was it? The order of original broadcast in New York or any other city doesn’t help because it was different in every market and completely up to the station owning the local rights. Copyright registration dates don’t help either, nor does the order in which they appear on the recently released DVD set. If the episodes had production numbers, I haven’t been able to find them.
However, I think I’ve solved the puzzle while slowly making my way through the set. Throughout the series the role of Hammer’s friendly enemy Captain Pat Chambers is played by Bart Burns. But in one early segment there’s a plainclothes cop who’s referred to only as Pat but is clearly meant to be Chambers. The actor who plays him is not Bart Burns but Ted De Corsia, who also played Sergeant Velie for much of the run of the Adventures of Ellery Queen on radio.
The episode is “Death Takes an Encore,†directed by Richard Irving and written by Frank Kane based on one of his short stories about New York PI Johnny Liddell (“Return Engagement,†Manhunt, February 1955, collected in Johnny Liddell’s Morgue, Dell pb #A117, 1956). For my money, that was the pilot.
The second question also involves Frank Kane. Back in the late Forties he wrote around 45 scripts for that classic radio series The Shadow, and for several years there have been rumors that at least one of his Hammer scripts was a rewrite of one of his Shadow scripts. But which?
I believe I’ve solved that puzzle too. Another early episode written by Kane, “Letter Edged in Blackmail,†shares a springboard with Kane’s Shadow script “Etched with Acid†(March 17, 1946): the protagonist in both tries to shut down a racket in which wealthy women with heavy gambling debts are forced to fake robberies of their own jewels. As neither Mike Hammer nor The Shadow would ever dream of saying: Q.E.D.
Death has claimed two actors who were well known for having played TV detectives. Efrem Zimbalist Jr. was the first to go. He died on May 2 at age 95, reportedly while mowing the lawn of his house in the horse-ranching community of Solvang, California.
People of my generation first got to know Zimbalist on the Warner Bros. TV series 77 Sunset Strip (1958-64), in which he starred as ultra-suave PI Stuart Bailey. No sooner had that series left the air than he started playing Federal agent Lewis Erskine on the even longer-running The FBI (1965-74).
When I met him — very briefly, at a film festival in Memphis — he was over 80 and still looked great. Judging from the photos of him I found on the Web, he still looked great in his 90s. Way to go! May we all be so lucky.
The other recently deceased tele-icon was James Garner, who at age 86 was found dead in his Los Angeles home on July 19. Like Zimbalist he was best known for two long-running TV series but his were in different genres.
His earliest claim to fame was as star of the Warner Bros. Western series Maverick (1957-63) but his interest for us stems from his years playing an un-macho PI in The Rockford Files (1974-80).
In his autobiography The Garner Files (2011) he claimed that Bret Maverick and Jim Rockford were basically the same character, but he never said and probably never knew that the character from which both were sort of spun off was an icon of U.S. detective fiction, namely that quintessential American wiseass Archie Goodwin.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if only there had been a Nero Wolfe movie with the middle-aged Orson Welles as Wolfe and the young Garner as Archie!
Both Maverick and 77 Sunset Strip were created by the same man, who was also a co-producer and, as John Thomas James, a frequent scriptwriter for The Rockford Files .
He first came to attention, however, as a mystery novelist. Roy Huggins (1914-2002) debuted in the genre with The Double Take (1946), whose protagonist, PI Stuart Bailey, was a character and first-person narrator owing a great deal to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and very different from the suave and perhaps a bit bland Bailey of 77 Sunset Strip.
Anthony Boucher’s review for the San Francisco Chronicle (February 3, 1946) was spot on as usual: “Mr. Huggins adds nothing to the established hardboiled formula but does an unusually able job within its possibly overfamiliar frame.â€
At that time, with Dashiell Hammett having written nothing since The Thin Man (1934), “the established hardboiled formula†meant Chandler. The latter may not have read The Double Take himself but he clearly found out about it and, as witness his letter to fellow pulp veteran Cleve F. Adams (September 4, 1948), he was not amused.
Somebody else informed Chandler that “the publishers told Huggins, in effect, that it was bad enough for him to steal my approach and my method or whatever, but stealing my characters was going a little too far. I understand there was some rewriting, but cannot vouch for any of this.â€
The letter to Adams can be found in Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, ed. Frank MacShane (1981), pp. 125-126. This is the only reference to Huggins in the index to MacShane’s book, but a careful reader will find Chandler revisiting the incident in later correspondence. Writing to spy novelist and later Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt on November 16, 1952, he says:
Exactly nine months later, on September 16, 1953, writing to a master at his alma mater Dulwich College, he adds a bit more detail to the story.
These quotations come respectively from pp. 334 and 352 of MacShane’s collection.
Huggins’ Hollywood career began when The Double Take sold to the movies and he was hired to write the screenplay for what was released as I Love Trouble (1948), with Franchot Tone as Bailey. By the time Chandler died, in 1959, Huggins had created Maverick and 77 Sunset Strip and both series were prime-time hits, but the creator of Philip Marlowe watched very little TV and may never have known that a sardonic prophecy he had made in his letter to Cleve Adams had come true:
Which is precisely what Huggins did.
August 3rd, 2014 at 8:57 pm
While most were idolizing actors and actress I grew up watching for my favorite writers credits to pop up. John Thomas James was among my favorite writers. Chandler’s complaints were not surprising considering how early detective fiction was done, with pulp writers doing a book a month and TV writers reselling rewritten scripts they had churned out for other series. Speed seemed more valued than originality. It was also know WB-TV westerns of the era were so inspired by earlier films the TV writer would just rewrite for WB old scripts on file (WB recycled more than just the stock footage).
People forget Huggins first worked on WB’s KING’S ROW then moved over to CHEYENNE. Huggins once was quoted as when he did MAVERICK he would think what would Cheyenne do and do the opposite.
ROCKFORD FILES worked because of James Garner (you can say the same for MAVERICK). The character was a stock character in fiction, the smart aleck. Hey, there are touches of Groucho in the character.
Huggins is over praised for ROCKFORD FILES but under praised with his work as head of Fox TV production in the 60s and his shows such as ALIAS SMITH AND JONES where the light action TV series was established.
And Chandler should talk. THE BIG SLEEP remains a brilliant piece of work so much so he reused the plot more than once himself.
August 3rd, 2014 at 11:37 pm
It’s hard to think of someone who had more impact on TV series in the 1950’s amd 1960’s than Roy Huggins. We need a biography or study exploring his influence. What we have just scratches the surface.
August 4th, 2014 at 3:20 am
Stuart Bailey appears, sort of, in Huggins’ LOVELY LADY PITY ME (1949)in a short scene where the fugitive-on-the-run protagonist calls a PI for advice. This book opens memorably with:
“To get where I was going you take any street in any direction….”
but the rest of the book is relentlessly forgettable.
August 4th, 2014 at 9:40 am
Walker, a biography has recently been released. “Roy Huggins, Creator of Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, The Fugitive, and The Rockford Files” by Paul Green (McFarland).
Lee Goldberg, best selling writer and writer/producer of a few TV series, has given it a glowing review.
August 4th, 2014 at 9:49 am
Thanks for the information, Michael. I didn’t know about this book until now, and even though it’s pricey, I think I may need it.
Lee Goldberg’s review may be found on the Amazon page for the book, or on his blog at
http://www.leegoldberg.com/feast-tv-history-buffs/
August 4th, 2014 at 9:52 am
#3. Dan, LOVELY LADY PITY ME was adapted for an episode of 77 SUNSET STRIP.
Have not seen the episode but the plot sounds great. Stu Bailey fires an op who had been blackmailing a client. When he does it scares off a beautiful mystery woman and potential client who had been waiting in the lobby. Stu then attempts to find her. The op turns up dead in Stu’s office. His alibi is he was with the mystery blonde who had refused to tell him her name.
August 4th, 2014 at 11:07 am
Just watched the LOVELY LADY, PITY ME episode and enjoyed it. I’m trying to go in order on Youtube. There are also Hawaiian Eye episodes, but from seasons 3 & 4.
August 4th, 2014 at 3:16 pm
#7. Bob, watch them fast on You Tube. WB has removed them at least once before and is getting tough on the unauthorized videos since they started WB archive streaming service.
http://instant.warnerarchive.com
I am a member and use it for my home page.
Oddly, enough the archive does not have the entire run of 77 SUNSET STRIP and HAWAIIAN EYE. The episodes they don’t have seem to be the ones posted on YouTube.
If you are like me and just want to watch the episodes before they disappear off youtube there are ways to burn them to MP4 dv-rs (they will play only on computers). Put ss between www. and youtube. It will lead you to a site that will explain how it works. I have a mac and have had no security problems with the site and I have seen a Mcafee security approval on the site.
August 6th, 2014 at 3:16 pm
“Borrowing” is such an old and honored technique in film television, and radio I don’t think anyone in those businesses even understands what they are doing, and Chandler can complain but he taught himself to write mystery by copying a ten thousand word Gardner story and then was upset he couldn’t use it. He didn’t publish it though, but I would love to read it,
Michael is right, Chandler ruthlessly self plagiarized — every story in Durham’s anthology KILLER IN THE RAIN was plagiarized for the later Marlowe novels, and he famously just changed the name of the hero of “Red Wind” from Dalmas to Marlowe.
Though here Huggins fails the old rule that plagiarism is when you steal from one source and inspiration when you steal from everyone.
Self plagiarism was a major source of entertainment. Huggins remade “Anything for Money” for almost every series at Warner’s and then later when he was on his own. The pilot for CITY OF ANGELS was used over and over again, and had been before COA. Mickey Spillane’s comic strip Cane and Abel story was done for 77 SUNSET STRIP at least seven times according to some sources and then loaned out for a friends novel. Several Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore scripts made the rounds of the Warner’s production company.
Huggins should have amended that statement to he took what Cheyenne ‘did’ do and Maverick did the opposite.
But the result in Huggins case was almost always entertaining, though it is a shame that considering their work together he and Garner ended up more enemy than friend.
August 6th, 2014 at 11:16 pm
Both Huggins and Garner shared at least one thing in common, WB screwed each, Garner and MAVERICK and Huggins over 77 SUNSET STRIP.
But you are right, David. Garner refused to do THE ROCKFORD FILES if Huggins was involved in any way. When Garner discovered Huggins had done some rewriting to a Stephen J. Cannell script without Cannell’s ok, he refused to appear on set until Cannell was given back control and Huggins was barred from the set or changing any scripts.
Speaking of Garner, his favorite TV series NICHOLS is now available to watch on WB archive streaming service for those who won’t pay for the overpriced DVD.