Chapter 22

Friday on His Mind

Jack Webb—Los Angeles

Born to a mother who filed divorce papers on his father before he was born, Jack Webb, the actor, director, writer, and producer, was born into poverty in 1920s Los Angeles. A sickly child, Webb lived with his mother and grandmother, both of whom worked menial jobs, often at night. Jack dove into reading anything he could get his hands on, and he could often be seen going through garbage cans behind his Bunker Hill apartment for reading material. A jazz enthusiast neighbor introduced young Webb to jazz music by giving him a Bix Beiderbecke record. It started his lifelong love of the music.

As a student at Belmont High School, Webb emceed variety shows, stealing his jokes from comedians he had heard on the radio. He was so popular that he was elected class president. After high school, Webb received a scholarship to Chouinard Art Institute, but he eventually had to drop out of school to help support his ailing mother and grandmother.

Jack Webb’s Old Neighborhood

Bunker Hill, the neighborhood where Jack Webb grew up, was lowered and cleared during the 1950s for urban renewal. The site is now LA’s modern downtown.

World War II found Webb working in an armory plant and landing bit parts in radio dramas. Tired of waiting for his draft number to come up, he joined the Army Air Corps, washed out as a pilot, and ended up typing correspondence at an air base in Del Rio, Texas. With his mother and grandmother ailing, Webb applied for and received a dependency discharge. As the war exploded throughout the world, the shortage of men in the workforce increased. Webb landed a position at KGO radio in San Francisco, using his time there to learn as much as he could about radio production. He would practice voice modulation for hours in front of a dead microphone and talk shop with engineers. After several weeks, Webb was promoted to voice announcer, and eventually he hosted an early morning jazz program called The Coffee Club.

With his energy, self-confidence, and fervent desire for perfection, Webb soon found himself in the position of lead actor in the radio program Pat Novak for Hire. Webb, who had already worked as a contributing writer on the program, was told by co-writer Richard Breen not to ham it up but to underplay Novak. Webb took this suggestion to the extreme and played the private detective as the ultimate hard-boiled wise guy, one who mouthed off to both cops and criminals. Even though the story line was pretty much the same each week, the show attained a loyal following in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Breen got a film offer in Hollywood that coincidentally happened just after he had had an argument with KGO’s management. Webb, who roomed with Breen, headed to Los Angeles with him.

Webb and Breen were signed by the Mutual Network to create and act in new radio programs. Radio was a fading medium by 1947, but Webb kept busy, acting in a half-dozen radio programs. One of his shows, Johnny Madero, provided Webb with enough financial security to marry his girlfriend, actress and singer Julie London.

Being a freelancer, Webb was used to contributing creative ideas, but his big mouth and confident manner turned off directors and producers. Consequently, Webb had a hard time finding work. His agent got him small roles in radio and film, including a minor part as William Holden’s jazz-loving friend in Sunset Boulevard and roles in the noir classics Dark City and He Walked by Night. Taking a page from the latter role, Webb developed a police show for radio, based on true stories from the Los Angeles Police Department files.

Dragnet first aired on June 3, 1949. Using clipped, clever, and straight-forward dialog, Webb, as Sergeant Joe Friday, joined with his partner to solve uniquely Los Angeles crimes for three hundred and eighteen episodes. In late 1951, Dragnet appeared on NBC as a television show and, until the radio program was canceled in 1955, two different versions of Dragnet were produced in separate media.

The 1951 television version of Dragnet eclipsed the radio program and became a big hit with viewers. After a series of sidekicks, Ben Alexander settled in as Officer Frank Smith for the duration of the series. Webb, a stickler for detail, had a representative of the Los Angeles Police Department on the set for accuracy, as he wanted to portray police in a positive light, far removed from the corrupt cops in his earlier work. The quick editing and close-ups of the actors worked perfectly on the small screen.

Webb filmed everything as quickly and as cheaply as possible. His greatest breakthrough in low-quality TV production came when he met Stanley Meyer, who owned the patent on the TelePrompTer. The TelePrompTer is an electronic screen that displays an actor’s lines and was designed to replace cue cards. Webb discovered that if actors read their lines directly from the TelePrompTer without rehearsing, there was virtually no difference in their performances. With all of the close-ups used in Dragnet, the TelePrompTer was the perfect tool for the program. Webb saved money by not rehearsing his actors, became an investor in the TelePrompTer, and hired Meyer to run his company, Mark VII Productions.

Dragnet was on the air for two hundred and seventy-six episodes, until 1959. It was one of the first network television programs to be syndicated. Lunch boxes, toy guns, and cigarettes were all merchandised with the Dragnet logo. Webb even released an album of love songs, which he spoke rather than sang.

Webb was the producer and director of Dragnet, and he ran the set like an army camp. There was no pampering of the actors, and everyone was treated fairly, as long as no one screwed up a scene.

Always on the lookout for film opportunities, Webb was able to finagle a multi-film deal after the success of Dragnet. He directed and starred in The D.I.— the title is military terminology for a drill instructor. Webb yelled so much in the movie that his once-smooth baritone turned into a raspy croak. On the plus side, he liked his military crew cut so much that he adopted it for the rest of his life.

Webb also directed and starred in Pete Kelly’s Blues, which in 2009 was named by the British film magazine Empire as “the thirteenth best gangster film you’ve never seen.” The cast included Janet Leigh, Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Lee Marvin, and a very young Jayne Mansfield. Webb had high hopes for his jazz-heavy drama, but it did poorly at the box office. Peggy Lee was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and the sound track was nominated for a Grammy, but Webb’s careless comments about show business and the people who run it again put him out of favor with the studio heads. Webb was the perfect example of biting the hand that feeds you.

Original episodes of Dragnet went off the air in 1959, and Webb found himself without work. He was on his third marriage and had to pay child support for the two daughters he had with London, who had divorced him in 1954. He feared the poverty he grew up in, and constantly floated pilots and scripts to networks and studios, but they had had enough of the mouthy man whose ego was bigger than his talent. Many Hollywood insiders felt that, had Webb not always filmed on the fast and cheap and actually taken some time with his projects, he could have been the equal of Orson Welles and John Ford.

In 1963, Webb took over as executive producer of the smash hit 77 Sunset Strip. He fired everyone but its main star, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. The show sank to the bottom of the ratings and was cancelled later that year.

In 1966, much to Webb’s dismay, there was interest in a new Dragnet. Webb wanted to move on from the show, but he was on wife number three and had to pay alimony and child support, and he couldn’t afford to turn down the offer.

Webb hired actor Harry Morgan to play his partner, Bill Gannon. Having witnessed Webb’s tirades on the set, Morgan quickly learned to let Webb do things his own way. The two characters wore the same suits in every episode so that they could simultaneously shoot different episodes while on the same set. It made things simple when they had to reshoot a scene. Everything was read off of the TelePrompTer. When close-ups were shot, the actors sat in chairs and read their lines. This caused problems with many of the actors, who were used to actually acting. If an actor embellished his lines, Webb would yell “Cut!,” and then tell the actor, “That was great! You could win the Academy Award with that performance. But that isn’t how we do things on Dragnet. Now just read the goddamn lines.” Many actors couldn’t adjust to Webb’s way of performing, and they were either fired on the spot or never asked back. The actors who played the game that Webb wanted to play were rewarded with steady work on the show.

Webb did not tolerate any horsing around on the set. He would spend twenty minutes berating a grip or soundman for the slightest thing, screaming about how much money was wasted because of a mistake. But Webb was also quick to laugh at himself. Once you got used to the way Webb wanted things done, he was easy to get along with.

It was expected of Webb’s employees that they would hang out with him after the day was over to drink scotch and eat steaks at the Cock and Bull Restaurant on Sunset Boulevard until the early hours of the morning. Many Mark VII employees’ marriages broke up because of the drunken late nights with Webb. Many of those nights ended up at his apartment across the street, where Webb would play DJ, spinning his jazz records through the latest audio equipment. He had one of the largest jazz record collections in the world.

Dragnet tackled such social problems of the day as drug addiction, child abuse, and racial inequality. The show’s final scenes always ended with what Webb called “the goddamn Jesus speech,” where he would tell the criminal exactly what he thought before he made his arrest. Webb hated doing Dragnet and the cut-and-paste production showed his attitude. In another life, Webb would have made a fine factory manager.

By 1970, Dragnet was finished. Webb was more interested in producing other shows for Mark VII, with Adam-12 and Emergency being his biggest hits.

Jack Webb died of a massive heart attack in his apartment on December 23, 1982. The Los Angeles Police Department flew its flags at half-staff that day, and a week later the department gave Webb an official memorial service, the first ever given to a civilian. Joe Friday’s badge number, 714, was retired from service.