“That was the one.”
“We’re cooking now.”
“Put that one in the time capsule!”
These were among the many superlatives the actor Cameron Mitchell would shout out after another mediocre scene in a ghastly television series entitled Swiss Family Robinson in which he played a sailor marooned on their island.
The series was produced by a schlockmeister named Irwin Allen, famous for huge hit films like The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure. There was nothing, however, to recommend Swiss Family Robinson. It was television at its worst. Conveyor belt cheap, it ran for twenty episodes in the 1975–76 season and hopefully is now and forever lost at sea.
I was invited to do a two-episode arc playing Jean LaFitte, the pirate, the lure being a promise of my own series; but a wasted two weeks of my life wearing a false mustache and embarrassingly falling upon my aluminum sword.
Cameron had been a good-looking leading man in the 1950s, making his Broadway debut as Happy in Death of a Salesman, doing the film version and starring in first-rate movies with James Cagney, Clark Gable, and Doris Day.
He was now fifty-eight, a fat, jowly mess, covering his sad decline with an over-the-top wisecracking demeanor; its most heartbreaking manifestation its constancy. From the moment he came on the set everything was just super and terrific and fantastic. His superlatives were mostly ignored by the cast and crew as he spewed them out ad nauseam to no one in particular. It was as if he dare not sit silent for a moment lest he face the depths to which he had descended. Actors who get thrown on the junk heap of our profession enter a purgatory made all the more painful by the glory that once was. And a manifestation of that glory in Cameron’s case turned out to be a costume period jacket.
It was hanging on the back of my camp chair. As Cam sat next to me, eyes closed, hands on his belly, snoring, a wardrobe lady came over, picked it up, and held it out for me.
“They’re ready for you, Frank,” she said.
The jacket was one of a half dozen I’d tried on from the stockpile of period clothes kept on studio lots. Beautifully made, blue, as I remember, with braiding and epaulets; inside, it had a vintage sewn-in label.
“Look,” I said to the wardrobe lady, “the label’s got Cam’s name on it.”
It read: “Cameron Mitchell” and the name of the film. My guess is that it might have been from a 1954 film he did with Marlon Brando called Desirée.
He was slowly coming awake and about to put on his own costume jacket, when she said in a loud clueless voice, “Hey Cam, look at this.” She walked over to him and held it up. “Must be twenty years ago.”
He was not yet up to his bravura self and hardly registered what was happening. “Let’s see if it still fits,” she said.
A little group gathered round as she came up behind him, held it up, and slipped in one of his arms. Before he could protest she was pulling in his other arm and yanking the jacket up to his shoulders. People were laughing and turning him around like a top as he awkwardly modeled it for us.
Then his set persona kicked in and he began to spin around, hold his arms out, and do a little yo ho yo ho strut. The laughter grew louder as he performed a kind of ridiculous jig in this period jacket now at least two sizes too small for him, making silly noises, kicking up his feet, like a vaudeville clown getting ready to throw a pie.
Everyone thought it was hilarious and seemed not to notice that, with each spin, his face grew redder and redder and his expression more and more frantic.
I walked over to him and waited for his spin to slow down. It did, and he faced me. I then said, “They need me on the set, Cam.” He silently turned around and I gently pulled the jacket from his shoulders. Once it had passed his wrists he moved quickly away toward his trailer, climbed in, and closed the door. As the dresser put it back on me she said: “He’s such a good sport.”
The year he died, his face came up on the television screen at the Academy Awards ceremony during the In Memoriam section, and I remembered an overweight actor doing a desperate dance trapped in a constricting jacket that had once been tailor-made for him. His name was greeted by a smattering of applause from a room full of people no doubt misguidedly confident that what they were wearing on that particular occasion was forever going to fit.