Personal farewells
Here we are, not even two-and-a-half months into 2020 and already so many great figures and artists to eulogize. If time were not an all-too-finite commodity, I would be singing the praises of greats like Max von Sydow and Kirk Douglas or such personal inspirations as Terry Jones and Buck Henry. Instead, I will take a few precious moments out of novel-writing and my personal life to remember three who have not been so widely recognized in the mass media and whose passings particularly touched me for nostalgic reasons.
Willie Loomis (1933-2020)
I was pleasantly surprised when the headlines on actor John Karlen’s obituaries in both Variety and Hollywood Reporter highlighted his roles in Dark Shadows and Cagney & Lacy—and in that order. I had fully expected Dark Shadows to get second billing or, more likely, not feature at all. I guess, if you live long enough, even your guilty childhood pleasures eventually come to accumulate a bit of respect.
Karlen was one of the more successful alumni of my favorite gothic daytime soap opera. Initially a stage actor, the Brooklyn-born actor (birth name: John Adam Karlewicz) went on to amass more than a hundred screen credits, including guest appearances and recurring roles on shows like The Streets of San Francisco, Charlie’s Angels, Hill Street Blues, Quincy, M.E. and Murder, She Wrote, as well as playing Tyne Daly’s husband Harvey on Cagney & Lacy for six years in addition to four spinoff TV movies. He was nominated three times for a supporting actor Emmy and won once—the only DS alum to get the statuette. Look up the YouTube clip of him winning if you want to see one of the happiest men ever in the universe.
Like most of the main Dark Shadows actors, Karlen played several characters in the show’s 1966-1971 run (he joined in 1967), but in fans’ memories he will always be Willie Loomis, one of a pair of grifters who stole into Collinsport with the aim of scamming the town’s most prominent family. He did not originate the role but replaced James Hall after a few episodes. Willie’s place in the DS mythos is crucial, for he is the one who inadvertently released the enchained vampire Barnabas Collins, thereby becoming Renfro to Jonathan Frid’s Dracula. Like his master, he wormed his way into our hearts as a surprisingly sympathetic villain, in a way becoming Barnabas’s conscience.
He reprised the role in the 1970 feature film House of Dark Shadows and played a different character in the 1971 sequel Night of Dark Shadows. Forty-one years later Willie would be played by Jackie Earle Haley in the Tim Burton version of Dark Shadows.
Karlen’s other big-screen credits include Jack Starrett’s A Small Town in Texas (with Timothy Bottoms and Susan George), Herbert Ross’s Pennies from Heaven (with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters) and Richard Benjamin’s Racing with the Moon (with Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage).
Among online Dark Shadows fans there was an outpouring of grief and memories upon Karlen’s passing. The loveliest tribute came from his friend and DS co-star Lara Parker, who memorably played the evil witch Angelique. She spoke movingly of his uncompromising nature and of struggles in his last years. “He was a fearless actor,” she wrote, “completely uninhibited, and totally believable. He didn’t really act, he inhabited the part. He was authentic to the core. He had a booming stage voice, and he could rant like a preacher, or rage like a longshoreman, and he seemed to have a bottomless well of emotion to draw from. He had contempt for some actors, but he idolized others. He loved Brooklyn, baseball, he loved the horses, he loved his wayward son, Adam, and he loved being Polish, and whatever he loved, he loved with a vengeance. Nothing was half way.”
John Karlen died in a hospice in Burbank, California, on January 22 at the age of 86.
Collinwood’s music maker (1924-2020)
For us Dark Shadows fans, what indelibly lingers in the mind is the show’s mood and atmosphere, various memorable scenes, the indelible characters, and most emphatically, the music. The creepy theme melody sent my mother scurrying to a far corner of the house after pressing play on the days I required her to tape the audio on a reel-to-reel recorder while I was at my summer job. The funny thing is that, since then, I have heard other arrangements of that music that sound sweet and elegiac. It’s not particularly the succession of notes that made it scary. It was all in the music master’s execution.
The various musical cues used, repetitive to the point of over-familiarity, throughout each episode alerted us to some shock or scare or bit of tension. Certain songs became stuck in our brains, notably “Quentin’s Theme” mysteriously playing on the old gramophone and alerting us to the presence of a sinister ghost. Or the old-style dancehall tune “I Wanna Dance with You” sung a character named Pansy Faye. Most haunting was the tune that was released by the 18th-century music box, a gift from Barnabas to his ill-fated love Josette, and sometimes heralded her returning spirit.
The composer of these melodies was Bob Cobert, who had a four-decade-long working relationship with DS producer Dan Curtis. Their collaborations comprised four feature films and two dozen television films, including the miniseries The Winds of War and its sequel War and Remembrance (in which Cobert had a cameo as a bandleader).
In the 1940s he played clarinet and saxophone at the Stork Club and the Copacabana. In the 1950s he wrote pop songs. Later he made his living writing themes for game shows like Password, To Tell the Truth and The Price Is Right. His final score was for the 2005 Showtime movie Our Fathers, about the Catholic church sex abuse scandal. He was also a teacher of film composition at the University of Southern California.
Bob Cobert passed away on February 19 at the age of 95 in Palm Desert, California.
The other Bilbo (1928-2020)
It broke my heart to hear of the death of Orson Bean last month. Yes, he was 91, so you might figure, well, that’s a good long life and maybe he was ready to go. I, however, knew better. I had been following him for some time, and I knew he was still enjoying life, was still working, was in complete command of his mental faculties and had plenty more to do. He would still be writing and acting if he had not had the bad luck to be struck first by one car and then by another while walking near his home in Venice, California. As it happened, I had seen him only a couple of days earlier, funny as ever, in guest spot on the Netflix sitcom Grace and Frankie. His sitcom appearances go all the way back to The Phil Silvers Show.
Bean’s birth name was Dallas Frederick Burrows. He chose his professional name purely because it sounded funny, to the apparent ire of Orson Welles. Bean was around so long that my mother was a fan of his long before I was. He was a regular and welcome guest on chat shows and game shows (To Tell the Truth, Match Game, Super Password). He was always the essence of wit, quick with a quip or a comeback or an engrossing anecdote. He was on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show more than 200 times—including more than 100 times as guest host—and on The Merv Griffin Show more than 60 times.
The Vermont-born son of a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, he got his start as a comic in New York nightclubs and cabarets before becoming an actor on Broadway. His big break was joining a star-studded cast in Otto Preminger’s 1959 movie Anatomy of a Murder. He seemed to drop out of sight for a while, leaving the industry and moving to Australia in the 1970s. Then he showed up again in a big way as John Cusack’s mysterious employer in Spike Jonze’s 1999 reality-bending comedy Being John Malkovich. (For several previous years he had also played a curmudgeonly shopkeeper on TV’s Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.)
Where had he been? Despite his innate gift for comedy, professionally he had some of the worst timing ever. He was a political leftist at a time when that was unpopular in Hollywood. Then years later he encountered a different sort of discrimination when he became a political conservative and born-again Christian. His daughter was married to the late Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart News, which has become a very different kind of media organization since its founder/namesake’s death.
I became re-acquainted with Bean’s history, stories and charm though his regular long conversations with comedian Dennis Miller on the former Saturday Night Live comic’s radio show and subsequent podcast. Nobody had better stories and jokes than Orson Bean. One could mention just about any prominent name in the entertainment business from the mid to late 20th century and Bean always seemed to have a relevant personal story—usually with an insight or detail you never knew before. For example, an anecdote about him as a wide-eyed callow performer on Broadway being collegially invited into an undraped Marilyn Monroe’s dressing room comes to mind.
In addition to a lot of TV guest acting roles (Murder, She Wrote, Diagnosis: Murder, Ally McBeal, The King of Queens, Will & Grace, How I Met Your Mother, Hot in Cleveland among many others), he was a co-founder of the non-profit actors collective Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice for which he wrote and performed.
Let’s remember a couple of notable Orson Bean roles. In a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone he played Mr. Bevis, a quirky fellow with a run of bad luck, who finds that he has a guardian angel. The angel offers to make his life perfect if he stops being so quirky. In the end Mr. Bevis decides to muddle through as he is rather than be someone he is not. In 1977 he provided the voice of Bilbo Baggins in an animated TV version of The Hobbit, making him the first actor to play the part. He reprised the role—as well as that of Bilbo’s younger relation Frodo—in a 1980 animated adaptation of The Return of the King.
Orson Bean died on February 7 at the age of 91. He is survived by his beloved wife, the actor Alley Mills, who was also a cast member of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman as well as the soap The Bold and the Beautiful. She is probably best remembered by most of us, though, as Fred Savage’s mother Norma on The Wonder Years.
-S.L., 12 March 2020
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