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Death of A Classic Bad Guy |
 JACK ELAM as Frankenstein's Monster in CBS' "Struck by Lightniing" |
Would you believe Elam
was an accountant?!!
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
Okay, I'll be the first to admit I've adopted some unusual pop culture heroes in my lifetime. And here's obviously my most outrageous example: While other boys my age were arguing whether John Wayne or Randolph Scott was the best screen cowboy, I was rooting for Jack Elam.
"Who?" they would say.
"Jack Elam,"
I would tell them. "You know, the guy who shoots babies
and laughs about it? The one who's so ugly he looks like his
Mom threw out the baby and kept the afterbirth? The guy who looks
like he's been run over by a cattle stampede BEFORE he's run
over by a cattle stampede?"
No, they usually didn't remember poor Jack at all--at least not
until I described him a little more specifically. Once I said
he was the bad guy who had one eye that kind of rolled around
in the wrong direction, then they'd say, "Oh, THAT guy!"
My pal Tommy Rader was the only other kid who thought Jack Elam ruled, although my little brother soon joined the cheering section, too, because he thought we were cool. In my experience, Jack Elam didn't have many fans, but they were loyal ones. Take Tommy, for instance. He's now on Social Security, but he's still a Jack Elam fan fan half a century later. Last year he sent me a newspaper clip of a rare Jack Elam interview. It was packed with stuff about what our hero had been doing lately. And, as I write this, I'm expecting a phone call from Tom. I can almost hear his voice, breathlessly saying, "Did you hear who died last Monday?"
Yes, it's true. Jack Elam,
who probably died in 98 of the 100 or so movies he made in his
long career as a Hollywood "bad guy," has finally died
for real. He was 84 or 86, depending on which birthdate you buy,
and living in rural Oregon, retired from the movies since the
early 1990s.
I'm sure Jack died with style. In his salad days, Elam died better
than anybody else in the movies. He was gut-shot and went out
kicking. He was run over by trains and ground up in printing
presses. He was dragged to death by a horse in "The Moonlighter"--in
3D, no less! My favorite Elam death was when he died gargling
quicksand in "Lure of the Wilderness."
Ordinary bloodless gunshot wounds were too banal for anybody as mean as Jack was on screen. He needed special pain to get what he deserved. When I saw his name in the credits for "High Noon," I expected Gary Cooper to blow a hole in him big enough to ride a Palomino through. And what a letdown it was when he turned up playing nothing but the town drunk that Cooper lets out of jail just before he goes off to face Frank Miller and his boys. When they cheated me of a great Elam death scene, I really felt lowdown. I nearly threw up when he sang a song and played the guitar in "My Man and I"--without spilling a drop of anyone's blood. Yuck!
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civvies, before he grew whiskers.Note the way his left eye drifts away. At right, Elam in western gear, up to no good. |
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What was the appeal of Jack Elam to a couple of junior high school kids? Well, I think we recognized this guy was a real character who was carving his own little niche in Hollywood. It was a hoot to try and guess how Jack would "get it" in each movie that rolled into town, most of them westerns or crime pictures--the sort of pictures that desperately needed lots of bad guys for the hero to wipe his boots on sooner or later.
As it turned out, Jack Elam was building a most extraordinary career. Originally, he was an accountant for Samuel Goldwyn Productions and for a long time handled the books for the outfit that made the Hopalong Cassidy westerns. When I first read that in a movie magazine, I could hardly believe it. I knew him only as the grungiest, meanest, most evil-looking piece of prairie trash in Hollywood.
My guess is Elam looked in the mirror one morning while shaving and decided the movies needed him in front of the camera, not sweating away over the company books back in the studio bungalow.
Jack didn't look tough enough to give any of the movie heroes a real hard time, so they rarely used him in fist fights. Thin to the point of emaciation, he looked as if he might need help climbing onto his horse. He was a new kind of "heavy" who always picked on defenseless women, kids and cripples. What else could he do in the "bad guy" world if even baby-faced Audie Murphy could beat him up with one hand tied behind his back.
Still, in the right light, he was darn sinister. When he turned that gimlet eye toward you, your blood ran cold. When he waited in ambush for Charles Bronson in "Once Upon A Time in the West," it wasn't to challenge him to a gunfight at high noon. He wanted to blow Bronson's head off, then spit in the neck hole.
But, as usual, Bronson got him first. As I recall, a fly was buzzing around Elam while he waited behind cover. My guess is he stunk to high heaven and Bronson either smelled him a mile away or heard the tell-tale buzz of flies.
Even if Jack wasn't very successful at killing heroes, his evil "look" created a special place for him in the movies. The 1950s ushered in a new era in movies. The public started to yearn for more realism. It was no longer suitable to just identify the bad guys by issuing them black hats. The new order of bad guys--led by the likes of Jack Elam, Lee Marvin, Lee Van Cleef and Ernest Borgnine--proved their badness by shooting lawmen in the back, after molesting their women, suffocating their kids and whizzing in their lunch boxes. Jack was there to be mean as hell--then to get his ass shot off by the hero.
In fact, his trademark look, beside the gimlet eye, was his absolute, total lack of any buttocks. I remember pointing him out to my Dad one night at the movies. Dad had heard me going on about Jack Elam for so long that he finally insisted I show him the man on screen. When I finally had the chance to tell him, "There he is! That's Jack Elam!," I impatiently waited for Dad's reaction.
His reaction was: "He has no butt."
Secretly, I think Dad got the point. He clearly never forgot Jack Elam. Every now and then, Dad would mention that he saw "No Butt" in a TV western the other night. And not long before he died, I remember him pointing at a slim young fellow who was walking by our house and saying, "He looks like old Jack Elam: No butt."
Ultimately, Elam grew old and acquired a butt, along with chin whiskers and, believe it or not, a genial manner. In his middle years, he started playing comic cootie-brains in pictures like "Support Your Local Sheriff," doing the sort of roles that Arthur Hunnicutt or Chill Wills used to play. A little later, he even started playing kindly old men, usually reformed drunks or drunks trying to reform. He ended up swapping lines with the sort of kid actors he used to shoot, drown or eat for breakfast.
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The first time I actually met Jack Elam, after I'd grown up and become a TV columnist, was on the set of TV's "Eight is Enough," where he was playing scenes with kids he probably could barely tolerate, no doubt because they made more money than him and wouldn't risk any of it in a poker game.
"I can't believe this,"
I told him. "You've turned into Walter Brennan in "The
Real McCoys"!"
Elam laughed big. "And ain't that the ever-loving shits!"
he said.
To me it was a bizarre
thing to wind up actually being around Jack Elam in the last
stages of his career. I think he was impressed that somebody
actually had grown up watching his movies and even knew who he
was. He was always gracious and funny and willing to explain
how he stumbled into acting while doing the books for the producers.
We talked at length while he was doing the short-lived CBS sitcom
called "Struck By Lightning" in 1979. In that show,
he played "Frank," the caretaker at a rural Massachusetts
inn, who was really the 230-year-old Frankenstein Monster. Elam
thought it was a mighty joke that he'd wind up in a sitcom, playing
a part that had nothing whatsoever to do with cowboys and outlaws.
And we talked a few times when he did another sitcom, NBC's "Easy
Street," in 1986, playing a seedy old character called "Uncle
Bully" opposite sexy Loni Anderson.
My wife even met him once while she was on location in the desert, doing interviews with James Brolin and Ronny Cox, who were filming "The Car." Elam was on a nearby location doing an episode of TV's "How the West Was Won." One of the guys from "The Car" introduced her to him as "the notorious Jack Elam." As she recalls, he managed to lift an eyelid and wink at her without breaking his concentration on the poker game he was playing with his pals. At that stage of his career, lifting an eyelid was probably a major undertaking.
But I most often saw Jack at my favorite hangout in the San Fernando Valley, the venerable Sportsmen's Lodge, where Jack had a luxury suite on the top floor--just down the street from the studio where he was doing "Easy Street."
Jack was a drinking man and mornings were not his best time. I remember the well-seasoned waitresses in the hotel coffee shop sort of coddling him through his breakfast ritual. They considered him a loveable character and they all treated him more like a hungover relative than a hungover movie star. "He's just plain folks," the girls used to tell me.
The last time I saw him in there he was trying to remember where he had parked his car the night before. He'd been partying somewhere in the valley and when he staggered back to his car, he'd forgotten where it was.
"I looked all over for it, but couldn't find it nowhere," he grumbled. "So I took a cab over here."
"That's all right, Darlin'," the venerable Gussie, the waitress, assured him, "We'll help you find it after breakfast. Now you'd better eat something, Jack."
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That's Jack with a cockatoo on his shoulder, playing a scene with a dog in an episode of TV's "Boomer" series. In the good old days, Jack would have shot and cooked them both. |
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Tom Rader and I frequently talk about Jack and all the old character players in the movies that filled up so much of our youth. Tommy's folks owned a motel in Santa Cruz, the beach resort town we grew up in, so he often spotted chareacter players checking in and chatted them up. Tom was a pretty fair makeup man and wanted to go to Hollywood and be the next Bud Westmore, building "creature faces" for the movies. That didn't work out, so he became a disk jockey, then ran a loan company with his brother until he retired a few years ago. I became a reporter and finally a TV columnist, so I spent much of my adult life rubbing elbows with the oldtimers like Jack that we used to see at the Saturday matinees.
Though I love all those old pictures and the big stars whose names were on the marquees, there was something truly special about the character players whose names most people never really new. I watched Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin grow into "name above the title" stars and win Academy Awards. I met Borgnine at a convention in San Francisco and had lunch with Marvin in his den in Tucson, Arizona. Lee Van Cleef and I crossed paths when he was doing a TV show called "The Master" in 1984. They were all regular guys who never regretted their long years as "heavies" in the movies.
But Jack Elam was my favorite because he seemed to have the biggest hill in front of him and always seemed to be enjoying the climb more than anyone else . On that last day I saw him in person, he kind of gave me a little high sign as he took off to try and track down his missing car. I think it was his way of saying, "Hang in there, buddy. I'll see you again sometime."
Which is sort of the way I hope it works out, too.
©2003 by Ron Miller. The photos from "Struck by Lightning" and of Elam in "civvies" are courtesy of CBS. The Jack Elam western mug shot is from the 1972 Academy Players Directory. The "Support Your Local Sheriff" photo is courtesy of United Artists. The "Boomer" photo is courtesy of NBC.
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