Posted on 03/01/2016 9:31:27 PM PST by Loud Mime
R.I.P., GEORGE By Burt Prelutsky
George Kennedy died recently. It ended a friendship that had lasted nearly half a century.
I first heard from Kennedy in 1967when, in my role as movie critic for Los Angeles magazine, I predicted he would win an Oscar for his performance as Dragline in “Cool Hand Luke.” He wrote me a thank-you letter. I, in turn, invited him to my housewarming.
Much to my surprise, he showed up with his wife, but stayed only briefly because they had already committed to another party. As a housewarming gift, he brought me the LP of Lalo Shiffrin’s score for “Luke.”
When he happened to mention at the door that he didn’t expect to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, I made him a $10 bet, based on my belief that Gene Hackman and Michael J. Pollard, both of whom had been nominated for “Bonnie and Clyde,” would split the vote.
I guess nobody in the history of the world has ever been happier to lose a bet than George.
He called to suggest he pay up over lunch. As Claude Rains put it to Bogart, it was the start of a beautiful friendship. Once, he even went so far as to tell me that I should never hesitate to pan one of his performances, that it wouldn’t affect our relationship. As it turned out, I panned a lot of his movies, but I never thought George gave a bad performance. He always seemed perfectly natural on screen, no matter if he was playing a cop, a priest, a judge, a gunfighter or a soldier.
If he seemed to be an especially convincing member of the military, perhaps it’s because he spent 16 years in the Army, some of that time trying to survive the Battle of the Bulge.
He had intended to put in a full 20 years, but his back began to act up. At the time, he had been assigned to be, of all things, the technical advisor on the old Phil Silvers sit com, “Sgt. Bilko.” But his back got so bad and his limp became so pronounced that George decided he needed to have an operation.
However, when he visited the Army hospital, he ran into two soldiers he knew who told him that they had had the operation performed and they were in worse shape than ever.
At that point, George called off the operation and paid a visit to the producer of “Bilko,” Nat Hiken, to ask if he could keep the job even if he was no longer in the service. Hiken told him the job was his, and Kennedy retired from the Army.
After a while, Hiken began to stick Kennedy in the back row of the soldiers in the barracks Bilko would address in every episode. That led to two life-changing events. The first was that Hiken’s secretary noticed Kennedy limping around the office and advised him to see her uncle, a chiropractor in the Bronx. He did, and his limp disappeared. (However, once he began appearing in Hollywood westerns, he had to visit chiropractors on a regular basis. And so, I suspect, did the horses that had to cart the three hundred pounder around.)
The other thing that happened was that Kennedy’s brief appearances on a hit comedy got him an agent. The agent advised George to go to Hollywood. At the time, there were a great many western series on TV, and a lot of the heroes were very large men. Guys like Jim Arness and Clint Walker needed large villains to beat up, lest they came off like bullies.
He later bragged that just about every good guy on TV had at some time knocked him down or shot him dead.
George first became known to movie audiences when he became the villain with the hook stalking Audrey Hepburn in “Charade.” It was his sympathetic portrayal in “Luke” that saved him from being typecast as a brute and helped extend his acting career to as recently as 2014.
Because George gushed about so many of his fellow actors, but especially his fellow WWII veteran, Jimmy Stewart, that I once asked him if he had ever worked with an actor he didn’t like. Reluctantly, he admitted there had been two.
The first was John Gielgud. Kennedy said that hardly a day went by on the set of the 1973 remake of “Lost Horizon” that Gielgud wouldn’t mention that he was accustomed to doing Shakespeare and that he had only stooped to doing this piece of shit for the money. While it’s true that the movie was a turkey, the cast included the likes of Peter Finch, Liv Ullmann, Michael York, Sally Kellerman and Charles Boyer. But, as Kennedy said, none of them felt the need to carry on as if they were slumming, even though they had earned their own stripes by doing the likes of “A Nun’s Story,” “Cries & Whispers,” “Cabaret,” “MASH” and “Gaslight.”
As George said, “If you’re a professional and take their money, you shut up and do the best you can.”
The other actor Kennedy had no use for was O.J. Simpson. It seems that every morning Simpson would bring his newspaper on the set of “Naked Gun.” But when he was finished reading it, to make certain nobody else would get his mitts on it, he’d ball it up and shove it to the bottom of a trash can. If you think about it, that sort of selfish attitude would go a long way towards explaining why the schmuck would have killed his ex-wife and her boyfriend.
Although Kennedy didn’t personally dislike Paul Newman, he knew that Newman resented the fact that George had won the Oscar for “Luke,” while he had only been nominated.
He also discovered that when it was time to cast “Sometimes a Great Notion,” and the producer wanted to cast George as Newman’s brother, Newman nixed it. The producer later let George know the reason was that Newman, who was 5-foot-9 hadn’t been comfortable acting next to Kennedy’s 6-foot-4. Instead, the Oscar-nominated role went to 5-foot-7 inch Richard Jaeckel.
In hindsight, it’s probably lucky that Robert Redford was only 5-foot-10 or “The Sting” and “Butch Cassidy” might never have been made. For years, the two of us would meet regularly for lunch at Art’s, George’s favorite deli in the San Fernando Valley. One mystery I could never solve was how he could resist the tempting aromas of corned beef and pastrami, but I never knew him to order anything but an egg salad sandwich on rye bread.
Once George moved to Idaho so his second wife could be close to her family, I never got to see him again. But we did exchange email and birthday greetings. George got into the habit of signing off as one of his favorite old-time character actors. So one time it would be Adolph Menjou, another time Beulah Bondi or Eric Blore. I then began doing the same, keeping alive the memory of all those people who helped make the movies of the 30s and 40s so memorable. So, good night, George. Please give my regards to Charles Bickford, Fay Bainter, Peter Lorre, Charles Coburn, Edward Everett Horton, Helen Broderick, William Demarest, Eric Rhodes, Eve Arden, Sydney Greenstreet, Edward Arnold, Una Merkel, Richard Haydn, Oscar Homolka, Henry Travers and the rest of the old gang.
I’m sure they’ve already welcomed you with open arms and an egg salad sandwich.
He made his living in a profession he loved. May he rest in peace.
Burt Prelutsky is a fine story teller. That was a good read. I could visualize and hear every single scene.
Beautiful remembrance. Thank you for posting. And thank you, Burt, for writing.
Bookmark.
I always liked George. I was glad he stuck around so long.
ping
Awesome.
Sadly I didn’t see him in any of the westerns. But I thought he was a great foil for Leslie Neilsen in the Naked Gun movies.
“Frank... Frank.... Those microphones aren’t for you... Weird Al Yankovic was on the plane...”
RIP George.. You were one of the Greats!!!
That was a great/interesting remembrance of George Kennedy. Thanks for posting.
Burt is one of the sharpest Hollywood historians around, and a conservative too. He has a good book on the people he met there. Worth getting for entertainment buffs.
Burt: Edward Everett Horton was a graduate of my high school, Baltimore City College HS, I think it was the class of 1916. Later we had Garrison (Gary) Moore (Gary Moore Show), the school clown, according to my uncle who went to school with him. And then Michael Tucker, my friend, teammate and club-mate, Class of ‘62 - “Radio Days”, “Diner”, “LA Law” etc.
Ah, those were the days.
George Kennedy will be missed. Thanks for the nice send-off.
Great read! Thanks for posting the whole article.
While J.D. Cahill (John Wayne), a widower and U.S. Marshal, is away from home, his two sons Danny (Gary Grimes) and Billy (Clay O'Brien) aid Abe Fraser (George Kennedy) and his gang to escape from jail and to rob a bank.
R.I.P., George Kennedy.
City HS was once one of the two premier public high schools in Baltimore, the other being the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute (Poly for short). City has unfortunately and regrettably declined, a perfect example of the public schools failure. Poly OTOH continues to thrive (perhaps its most famous alumnus is H L Mencken). Two of my B-I-Ls are City grads; I went to Poly.
Wonderful remembrance. Sorry to hear that Paul Newman was so... petty.
Farewell to a great actor.
Old school. Great actor and fine human being
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