INTERVIEW WITH EFREM ZIMBALIST, JR. - Part 2 - Nov. 27, 1997
Inteview conducted by Sylvia Stoddard
SS: Were you at all upset when Edd Byrnes's Kookie became the popular character in the series? I
remember that once you said you were stuck with the old ladies.
EZ: Oh, I said it to be amusing. I said that they covered all their bets at Warner Bros. They had the
teenagers with Kookie, the young marrieds with Roger and the old goats with me. Roger was funny. When
we began the series, he had these suits--the jackets of his suits were just rectangles. They were the
funniest-looking jackets I'd ever seen in my life. They had no shape at all. They were just rectangles with
sleeves in them. They looked like the Tin Woodsman. It turned out--and it was very touching--that his father
had a store in Nogales where he lived and he made these suits and Roger wore them out of affection for his
father. It was very, very sweet.
SS: Yes, I believe he told TV Guide that he was almost a clothing manufacturer in Nogales
himself.
EZ: It was really his singing and guitar-playing that got him out of there. He was never the greatest
singer in the world, but I'd like you to produce a better guitar player than Roger. He never particularly liked
acting. Maybe it was because of his being multi-gifted, but the proof of the pudding is that when he left, he
never even tried to act again. He's a creative person in so many ways behind the camera that I think he much
prefers it to acting. But the question you asked before, we never--any of us--had the slightest feelings of
jealousy or resentment toward the others. We were genuinely fond of each other and had a great time
together. And we laughed. You know, Roger and I got to a point where we couldn't do a scene together
because we'd break out laughing. I'll never forget one episode. It was the amnesia script, the one where an
old secretary comes back to work as though the last six years hadn't happened. And the writer was trying
manfully to establish this amnesia thing right off the bat so you'll know what the story is. So I bring her into
my office and Roger comes in and I say "Now, why don't you tell us what the trouble is." And
she says, "Last night I killed a man." And Roger has a line, "Last night..?" meaning
it was a long time ago. But anyone's normal reaction would be, "You what?" Well, it was so
absurd, such a ridiculous line that he couldn't say it--particularly with me looking at him. I think dear
George Waggner was directing it, and he had very little patience with this kind of laughter which made
it worse, when you're having hysterics and someone is frowning at you, it makes it worse than ever. So Roger
finally solved it by tying his shoe on the line. It was the only way he could get the line out. We were just
dead from then on. We simply couldn't look at each other. So we sat down and said, "Look, we've got
to get through this show somehow, here's what we'll do." I said, "I'll look at you, you turn away.
When you look at me, I'll turn away." Or he said it, or whoever said it. Anyway, we evolved this
system of never looking at each other through the whole thing. We would be turning away or
coming back and we did that all through that episode. Our eyes never met. And do you know, when that
thing went on the air, a lot of people said Roger and I played together better than we ever had in the whole
series. You know what's interesting about it--as far as the acting profession goes, if you have an idea, and
most drama teachers teach you to have a concept in your mind that brings the whole scene into focus,
because that's what the meaning of the scene is. Well, here we were doing something that had nothing to
do with the scene at all. It was just keeping us from laughing. But because we were concentrating so
intently on that fact, it gave a point to everything that we said or did. It was quite extraordinary. It
heightened the whole thing. Of course the public who was watching hadn't the slightest idea why we were
doing this or even what we were doing. My only point is, we were all great friends and we had a super time.
We had a really close family relationship. It is a family because you're together more than you are with
your family. I just finished working on The Visitor and it just broke my heart--they've been canceled
and they've got one more show to do. It's a good show, very thoughtful and so forth. It broke my heart to be
with them all because I know how this was beginning with them. They were developing this family feeling
and boom, they're off the air.
SS: Do any other episodes stand out in your memory?
EZ: Oh, one with Monty, who, as I said was a titanic genius and he had no false pride of any kind. He
loved everybody and was gregarious and fun-loving, but he had no sense of his genius himself. There
was an episode where he had me end up in this big tank that filled up with water. I get in this thing and I
can't get out and the water comes in and gets higher and higher and it had got up to about my chest and
Monty cut and turned to the crew--he hadn't figured out how to get me out of there! So he turns to the crew and
yells, "Anybody have any idea how to get him out of there?" And some grip or someone says why
don't you do this and the electrician says that and he says "No, no, no, let me think about it." And
finally he comes over to me--I'm standing in this water--and says, "I tell you what. You take off your belt
and you throw it up and catch the buckle on a nail and you pull yourself out." I said, "Monty, come
on. First of all, how would there be a nail in the thing to begin with? And second of all, how could I hit it with
the belt? I'd have to do it twenty times." And he said "No. You gotta do it the first time. If you do it
the first time, we'll get away with it." So we did and got away with it because it was so quick that
people wouldn't stop to say, "Oh, come on, how could he ever do that?" They believed it. And he
knew they'd believe it. That was typical of the way he worked. He never thought anything of his gift
at all. He just loved it. He loved acting. He began selling medicine in a carnival in Arkansas or
somewhere.
SS: So 77 Sunset Strip was a hit and they cloned the show endlessly.
EZ: You heard how that came about? How they did the Hawaiian Eye pilot? It was extraordinary.
We came to work to shoot our regular show and Stanley Niss came up to me and probably to Roger on the
first shot we did and said, "Now on this show, we're going to do everything twice. You go do your scene
and when you're through, we're going to put two other actors in there and do the same scene."
We were totally mystified. We said, "Hey, what's wrong with us?" And he said "No, no, this
is going to be a pilot for another show. We have another Efrem Zimbalist and another Roger Smith that we
want to test. And we both said "Why? Why don't you do something original?" And they said,
"Well, this is a successful show." And that's what they did. Every scene, they repeated and the
whole show was done twice. Two casts. And that was their pilot.
SS: Do you realize you were on one of the first modern private eye shows and one of the last, with
Remington Steele?
EZ: I never thought about that.
SS: Was it fun doing your daughter's show?
EZ: I enjoyed it more than anything I've ever done in my whole life. My four appearances with her.
To walk on her set was so wonderful to me.
SS: And Daniel Chalmers was wonderful.
EZ: Wasn't he a fun character? I loved playing him. Michael [Gleason] was so dear to write it in the
first place and to let me play it in the second, I loved doing it.
SS: And you got to dance with her.
EZ: Yeah. I was courting Beverly Garland, who was her mother on the show. Of course, Stephanie
hated me all through the show--all the episodes--she didn't like me at all and she also didn't trust me and
I was shifty and all that business. As I recall, this dance we had, she told me to lay off her mother or
something, but anyway, we had this scene where we danced in a room and--as can only happen in
Hollywood--this was just a casual little dance and we were talking over it. And they got in this dancing
master to teach us steps! This fellow who took himself terribly seriously like something out of
The Red Shoes and he's there with his little martinet thing, "And a one-two-three" and we
started to go, Stephanie and I, this stupid thing. And on top of that, we're talking, they have to shut the music
off because they have to dub the music in afterwards, so they put some kind of earphones in us so we could
hear the music and keep time as we were dancing. But we had to talk at the same time. So listening to the
music and trying to dance and talk, [sing-song voice in 3/4 time] we were talking/like this we/were talking...and
we went crazy, she and I, just fell down laughing. It was so ridiculous, the whole thing. If they'd just had
us the way I've always done it in the movies, you just sort of stand there and sway from foot to foot, you're in
a close shot and who knows what your feet are doing? But here they had to have all of this.
SS: Do you think your parents would be pleased that Stephanie's done so well and your career has
been a tremendous one?
EZ: I hope so. I was such a horrible disappointment to my parents when I got kicked out of college and
I've never gotten over what I did to them. It was just awful. I was a total mess in my youth. I was no good
at all. I just adored my parents. I loved them so. Particularly my mother--my father lived much longer. He
came and lived out west. He originally was not terribly happy about my deciding on this career but he was
wonderfully generous and would back me in anything I wanted to do.
SS: He lived until 1962, so he saw you do 77 Sunset Strip.
EZ: Yes and movies, and he respected anyone who did anything well, no matter what it was, particularly
if they could manage to make a living and live off of it. But my poor mother died when I was an ass of an
aspiring actor for no reason other than I thought it would be an easy life. It's an awful load I carry always.
The only consolation I take from it is if you're going to be the mess I was, it's better to do it when I did than
when you're fifty.
SS: You know, it's hard sometimes to not think Stu Bailey and Lewis Erskine [from Zimbalist's long-running
series, The F.B.I.] aren't alive and living somewhere.
EZ: It often occurs to me that I was lucky with those two characters in that they weren't too far from me.
Not that there's any law enforcement in my background or anything like that. They weren't extreme. But when
you take a character like Columbo or Archie Bunker, they were so strong, so indelible--and Jean Stapleton's
character too--that they never in the rest of their lives no matter what else they do they're always remembered
for that. They're impregnated with the character that they've made and it's almost like a prison that they've
made themselves because they can never do anything afterwards. Redd Foxx too. Pete Falk is sublime in
Columbo but who wants to see him in anything else? He's done other things, but they don't matter. It's
only Columbo.
SS: Now, your final season on 77 Sunset Strip, Bill Orr is gone, Howie Horwitz is gone, Jack Webb
is in and William Conrad, and the Sunset Strip is gone and you're in the Bradbury Building.
EZ: I didn't realize at the time what was happening. It's only when I subsequently looked at it that I
realized that he [Jack Webb] was re-creating [Joe] Friday. I became Friday. I even had his suit--his gray
sportcoat and I didn't realize it at the time.
SS: It was much closer to Roy Huggins's original Stu Bailey.
EZ: Yes, and it was much closer to the truth of what private eyes are like. It was strange because
we did some wonderful shows, just wonderful. One thing just ruined the show for me and that was my part
in it. Everything else I loved. But Warners or Jack Webb or maybe it was Bill Conrad did something very
peculiar. They took all of my dialogue over to Jim Murray, probably the greatest sportswriter [for the Los
Angeles Times] who ever lived. He's an absolute genius, an incredible figure. They took all of my
dialogue and said "Do a treatment on his lines." So Jim Murray rewrote every line of mine. It's
not his métier, it's not his strength at all, it's not what he does. Well, it's certainly not Jim's fault--he was only
doing what they told him to do, but it just doesn't fit. I can't watch it anymore. It spoiled the whole show for
me. Some of the shows are marvelous and then this idiot comes in and starts talking--ME--and I have to
cover my ears. And the paradox is that one of my greatest heroes in the world is Jim Murray. He's a great
literary figure. But the stories that year were wonderful. Bill [Conrad] was superb, he could do anything.
He was the first person I ever saw do something, I was shot and I became the camera and the room started
swirling around as I fell. Things like that that were so inventive. He had a Shakespearean production he was
trying to sell Warners on--I forget the play--but he was a man of huge vision and ability. It was a strange
feeling that last year. And the public would have none of it and rightly so. But there were wonderful shows
done.
SS: And the actors you worked with in "5"...
EZ: Yes! I have a cartoon done in the style of Dickins's great illustrator Cruickshank of me surrounded
by all of them. Ed and Keenan Wynn and Walter Slezak and wonderful people. And Nick Conte, who was in
my first movie.
SS: Well if they had to change it, at least it began with something truly special.
EZ: Yes, it was the longest piece of film ever made at the time.
SS: In your very first series, Concerning Miss Marlowe, who did you play?
EZ: Gavin, my name was, and I was a soupy lawyer with pasted-on gray sideburns. Terrified every
minute I was on. It was a 15-minute show. Live. And I was shaking the first show and I shook the last.
Under-rehearsed, always and no help if you went up. You just scrambled around, floundered, frightening.
It took ten years off your life.
SS: Live television must have been terrifying.
EZ: That reminds me of something that happened when I was still in New York doing Concerning
Miss Marlowe and that was, Eva Marie Saint was working on what was, in effect, a miniseries. I think it
was also NBC. They had these two, 2-week stories they would do and then they'd bring in a new cast and
a new story. And she was shooting in some former theatre on upper Park Avenue and she's in an airplane.
She's on the aisle and he's in the window seat. And they're flying through the air discussing pimples and
problems, which is what all soap operas discussed in those days. Now we have sex, pimples and problems.
All of a sudden, they both went dry. They couldn't think of their lines, couldn't think of anything to say and
then just froze in terror. There was this awful silence. Finally, he says, "Well, this is where I get out"
and he crawled out of the window onto the soundstage. Leaving her sitting in the plane all alone. So she
kept looking out the window, saying "Oh, I hope he's all right" and vamping for the rest of the time
because she's all alone there. Of course, the next day, he's back in his seat and they go on from there.
SS: Any other nice memories from 77?
EZ: I just thought of a wonderful episode we did on 77, "All Our Yesterdays," about the
making of a silent movie. It's charming and they got a lot of old silent movie people to act in it. Francis
X. Bushman and John Carradine was in it and the story's of an ex-silent star decided to do something for
her friends of those days who are all on hard times. So she decides to make a million-dollar silent movie
and she funds it. We used all the old silent movie cameras on the set. So she's sitting on the soundstage
and one of these friends comes up to her and says, "My dear, it's wonderful what you're doing for us
and we're all very grateful. But you know, the makeup man isn't what he used to be." So the star turns
to her friend and says, "Well, my dear, you must understand. He's thirty years older." Dick Bare
won the Emmy for directing that one.
Interview with Wm. T. Orr
Interview with Roy Huggins
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